Framing late Soviet Russia

At the dawn of the October Revolution and in the following years, the artistic and musical production of the soon-to-be Soviet Union was animated by a fervor that had no precedents. The artistic and sonic landscape of the 1920s resembled that of a vast experimental ground, where various groups and avant-garde movements could project their desires for the creation of a utopic new world. Much has been researched about the artistic endeavors of this decade, although not profusely around sound (Bowlt 1976; Imposti 2000; Ovadija 2013; Cardullo 2017), yet no one described the atmosphere of this practice better than Andrey Smirnov, leading scholar on Russian electroacoustic experiments of the 1920s, and founder of the Theremin Center. In his seminal book Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, he affirms: “People were working towards realizing the projection of a bright future; everybody was inventing something, researching, and experimenting with the hope of finding a ‘miracle’—the next big idea to catch on. These new trends strongly affected the Russian political and social spheres, and also played a role in the communal transformation of public consciousness” (Smirnov 2013: 16).

As we well know, the turbulent excitement of the 1920s didn’t last long. Followed by alternating periods of harsh repressions and stagnation, the initial revolutionary enthusiasm curbed into apathic delusion for many citizens of the late soviet decades – before falling into an extreme chaos caused by a collapse that happened too fast and with no protective measures for society.  This is probably one of the main reasons for which the complicated and defeating phase of such utopia has been quite unfathomable to scholars from artistic and sonic disciplines who are not yet familiar with Soviet cultures academically or biographically. Certainly, the late Soviet period is more nuanced and heterogenous than generally depicted in the West (Lipovetskiy et al. 2021; Fitzpatrick 2004) and it has been inhabited by a plethora of unofficial artistic and sonic practices that not only reflected the extreme mutability of those years, but that even concurred to it. Even though the policies of Perestroika and Glasnost’ introduced in 1985 were initially perceived as another state-orchestrated campaign without any outcome, Soviet people began to realize in a few years that something was changing, and rather precipitously. This article observes from a sonic perspective on how this moment of passage sounded for the last generation born and grown up in Russian USSR, who assisted the transition from the apparent immutability of an everlasting status quo to the decline of Soviet ideology and its sudden collapse. More specifically, it focusses on one non-conformist artistic circle in Leningrad and at the ways in which sound influenced their artistic practice, as well as the political and cultural impact their sonic practices had on society outside of the generalist dichotomy between state and dissidence.

Dissidence, unofficiality and (hyper)normalization

Despite the tradition of Soviet dissidence of the 1950s to the 1970s, cultural and art makers critical towards the late Soviet Union often did not challenge the system openly and publicly, and Brezhnev’s repression policy somewhat justified a certain  feeling of inescapability from the eternal state of things. On the other hand, the division between public and private lives was not articulated in binary oppositions between the regime and the non-conformists. Especially after 1985, the boundaries between legality and illegality (or simply accessibility and inaccessibility) became porous and relied on processes of constant negotiation, on circumvention, and on the use of loopholes in the system to one’s own advantage. Furthermore, it is important to note that some Socialist principles promoted by the government were actually valued by many citizens – the contradiction lied, rather on the lack of their actualization. As we will see, this nuanced relationship between official and unofficial language was reflected in daily life phenomena as much as in artistic and musical ones, multiplying the semantic planes of a single enunciation.

This peculiar phenomenon has been described by anthropologist Aleksey Yurchak (2006) as “hypernormalization”—the paradox of living in a society where everyone knows that the system is failing but, not being able to imagine any alternative, perpetuates a simulated acceptance of the official discourse. This implied that in the life of most citizens, languages and structures (or in other words: signifiers) of the hypertrophic authoritative discourse were reproduced, but their meaning (the signified) was already unimportant and emptied. Despite Yurchak’s analysis has the claim to be appliable to Soviet Union in its entirety although based on a dominant russocentric perspective and documentation,  this performative shift is in fact evident in Soviet Russian popular culture, and especially in Russian rock, with styob, a form of extreme irony based on the overidentification with the object it points at to the point of obfuscating its earnestness. Non-conformist cultural and artistic circles consciously operated and experimented at the margins of such performative shift –detaching, emptying and reassembling the original constative meanings, images and sounds.

New Artists

A peculiar example of this can be traced in some of the activities of the New Artists, a Leningrad-based collective that progressively articulated these dynamics through sound and various other artistic media, marking the passage from USSR to its ideological and political final dissolution.

Timur Novikov, Evgeniy Kozlov, Oleg Kotel’nikov, Kirill Khazanovich and Ivan Sotnikov founded the group in 1982 under a name that jokingly reclaimed the legacy of the avant-gardes and especially their theory of “everythingness” (vsyochestvo) as a principle of absolute synthesis of the arts. In this decade, the group produced works in aesthetical consonance with the New Wild (Die Neue Wilde) and New Wave in Europe and the US (see also Andreeva 2007). Their events held spontaneously outdoor, occasionally even on the streets, attracted other artists, counting in the mid-1980s Sergey Bugaev, Sergey Shutov, Andrey Medvedev, Oleg Maslov, Andrey Krisanov, Aleksey Kozin, Inal Savchenkov, Vadim Ovchinnikov  and Mikhail Taratuta, amongst others. The open character of their activities aimed at a more democratic accessibility—both in terms of technical skills and material availability— compared to the activities recognized by the Union of the Artists, the organ that de facto approved and controlled artists’  status, style, and material possibilities. Such events also aimed at facilitating exchanges and contaminations between different artistic individualities, according to the “everythingness” politics of blending heterogeneous elements, styles, and disciplines in a single artistic process. “Everythingness” meant also “everyoneness”: everyone can make art, and everyone can participate in the groups’ creative process, which is thus the result of a participatory practice sui generis able to transcend the traditional division between different art forms. In relation to sound, New Artists tied a deep creative relationship with musicians like the band Kino, who later would be consecrated as the most popular rock stars in the USSR. Most interestingly, some members of the New Artists began to build sounding objects and ready-made instruments: Novikov’s friend Aleksey Svinarskiy brought medical equipment to create intercommunicating cassette recorders; Novikov and Sotnikov created instruments made of a simple long string (the “dropper”), and the “Utyugon” (derived from “utyg”,  ”clothing iron”), consisting of an ordinary tabletop under which irons were suspended on strings and connected to a pickup. Once pushed or pulled with a hand movement, the irons freely swayed and knocked against each other making unusual sounds for several minutes, sometimes even half an hour; the strings could instead be played separately by fingerpicking it with a bow (Andreeva 2018).

In 1982, after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, Timur Novikov and Kino drummer Georgiy Gur’yanov met with jazzist Sergey Kuryokhin for the first of a series of so-called “Medical concerts” in the literary club 81. The concert was also a premiere of some of the self-made instruments, and especially of the Utyugon, presented as the first analog synthesizer in the USSR. Kuryokhin, already quite renowned as a brilliant jazz musician, continued a close collaboration with New Artists and Composers, who would often appear in his highly performative music project, “Pop Mechanics,” that took shape in those years. The last of the ”medical concert” series took place on December 1983 at the Dostoevskij Museum-Apartment, when the loud noise and extreme excitement of the participants forced the management of the building to end the show and disperse the group. Although these sonic explorations, much closer to the electroacoustic experimentations happening in the West and particularly to Cage’s performances, would deserve much space of discussion in the field of Sound Studies in USSR, this paper focuses on the further directions taken by the New Artists. Not only this choice aims to show an even more impactful influence in their whole poetic that is still largely understudied, but also traces how such influence is deeply rooted in sonic thinking and cosmist longing as well, constituting the backbone of their ironic and styob-like poetic, the origins of Soviet rave culture and a peculiar form of sonic fiction.

Introducing sonic fiction

The term sonic fiction has been coined by British-Ghanaian writer, theorist, and cultural critic Kodwo Eshun in his seminal book More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) in the context of the Afrofuturistic music that proliferated in those same years. The  term emerged not only as a concept able to elucidate the interactions between Afrofuturism, science fiction, and music genres such as Techno, Electronica, Jazz, and others. It also aims—and rather overtly—to criticize the “giant inertia engine” current music journalism embodies and to broaden its possibilities by writing with and within sound itself. Although Eshun carefully avoids delineating a specific definition of sonic fiction, its concept has become a quasi-mythological point of reference for musicians, artists, researchers, and writers alike since its inception. Its concept goes beyond the mere amalgamation of critical writing, theory, and reverie contaminated by sci-fi, and is by no means solely a sensory narration of sonic experiences. Sonic fiction is mainly a praxis stemming from the hic et nunc of the sonic and leading to the creation of new narratives and signification systems: music pieces production and fruition can be sonic fictions as well (Eshun 1998: 25). As Holger Schulze notes, this notion is embedded also beyond and around most direct forms of sound production and experiences:

“Sonic fiction is everywhere. Where one can find sounds, one will also detect bits of fiction. As a consequence, sonic fiction might then mainly be found in the tiny and ephemeral, often rapidly vanishing intersections and interferences between texts and lifestyles, between a given recording medium, its material properties, its design and processes of storing, retrieving and reproducing sound—as well as all its listeners appropriating all these qualities of the recording medium to play an intrinsic and radiating part in their lives.”

(Schulze 2020: 1)

The manifestations of sonic fiction ascribed to the endeavors of the Leningrad art group possess a different character from the original, Afrofuturistic one, not solely owing to their do-it-yourself (DIY) modalities or their divergence in terms of technology used, its materiality, and aesthetic principles. While it is clear that the dynamics of fictive constructs through sound can be found across various contexts and cultural milieus, particularly in relation to marginalized and oppressed communities, it is paramount to acknowledge and commemorate that the genesis of sonic fiction fundamentally emerges as a tool specifically intrinsic to the Black political and cultural struggle, a struggle that is incomparable to that of unofficial Soviet circles of the 1980s. “Sonic fiction is everywhere,” but not to acknowledge the origins of such concept would be a gross ethical and intellectual fault. As previously indicated, the late Soviet period reveals a greater depth of complexity and diversity than the prevailing portrayal often found in Western narratives and, despite the indisputable instances of repression imposed by the Soviet state, there existed pockets of relative freedom within the interstices of dilapidated societal power structures. Within these discreet enclaves and intimate social gatherings, known in Russia, and especially Leningrad, as tusovki, citizens and unofficial artists could find spaces to navigate and express themselves in some ways, although not ideal ones, and the tusovki of the New Artist group managed to make much out of it.

New Composers

In the early 1980s in Leningrad, longtime friends Valeriy Alakhov and Igor’ Verichev made the very first musical recording of their past collaborations in the studio of the Malyy Drama Theater, where Verichev worked as a sound engineer between 1983 and 1985. Alakhov and Verichev were also colleagues at the Leningrad Planetarium, where they were part-time caretakers of the soundscapes and audio pieces during educational excursions in the building. It is in this context that their first sonic experimentations took place, influencing their future music production in terms of source material and aesthetics. Released in 1983 under the title Cosmic Space, the album is an original compilation of their first musical pieces composed of field recordings of birds and natural environments, radio transmissions, technical noises and, unsurprisingly, sci-fi sounds coming from the Planetarium and radio broadcasts. Available to the public is nowadays only its renewed version of 1995, which includes in its mid-section additional contemporary beats in the spirit of the 1990s but nevertheless contains most of the original structure and sounds. The five-minutes track lending its name to the compilation opens with a clear statement composed with two segments sampling a deep voice: ”I love you… cosmic space.” The repetition of the statement seems to reaffirm its certainty, while creating at the same time the rhythmic base for a comforting soft jazz intro blending with the chirping of birds and water. A series of beats (probably added in the later version) softly accompanies a delicate violin solo, when a twinkle suddenly sparks in the foreground, followed by the sound of a voice gasping in stupor. The twinkle is then followed by a flashing sound, similar to the opening of a bottle and the launching of an object in the air, that arouses the clapping of an invisible audience that closes the piece with a choral of bravos ranging out. Although the sources of the samples are quite intuitive, the track is able to create and maintain a wondering and floating atmosphere coherent in its unfolding. Undoubtedly, the narrative character of the piece helps to recreate the movement from Earth into the air, reproducing the traditional aesthetic imaginary of what a journey towards cosmic space would sound and feel like by using materials and samples extracted primarily from everyday sounds. This narrative approach, most certainly derived from the professional practice of the duo, would progressively give space to compositions more focused on the sampled-based nature of their collage, and thus to rhythm and the quality of sound textures. This change has probably been ignited by the collaboration Alakhov and Verichev started with the New Artists a few months later. When, at the end of 1983, the duo met with Timur Novikov in his squat on Voinova street, the album recorded at the studio in the Malyy Theater greatly impressed Novikov, who then invited the duo to join the collective and baptized them “New Composers.” The excitement of the artistic leader was not only related to the pleasantness of the piece, but primarily happened due to its compositional features, which appeared to him a sonic translation of the New Artists’ “everythingness” concept. De facto, Cosmic Space happened to be much more than a translation of it: it was a catalyst for moving towards a more mature strategy of “Recomposition”, which aimed to break through the borders of different arts and genres by jumping from one point to another (Novikov 1996). In his writings, Novikov recognized the importance of the duo in the development of the New Artists’ poetic, although he tended to subsume it within his own practice, a tendency quite noticeable in his somewhat self-centered artistic persona. For this reason, it might be of use a closer analysis at the works of Verichev and Alakhov presented to Novikov.

Versification of Information, Recomposition and speculative sonic fictions

In 1983, Verichev explained the logic behind the duo’s practice in a manifesto called ”Versification of Information”, affirming that “the manipulation of sound materials from different areas of our lives gives music a new, rapidly changing meaning: this is what creates new musical objects that do not need to be compared with reality” (Verichev 1983). Sounds—including soundscapes of various natures­— are perceived as a highly informational material which, once deconstructed in the narration of their composition and (rather limitedly) in their sound, creates another poetic, versified fictive world of new meanings out of the old one. According to Verichev, this type of sonic thinking and practice doesn’t need to create totally new texts in order to produce new meaning. Rather, we might propose, it suffices to diversify the sonic information in terms of sources, deconstruct it in fragments, and re-construct it in repetitions and alternations able to create a poetic work. Versification is, by definition, an artistic expression articulated through verses and mainly based on meters, the regular repetition of specific linguistic elements typical of a certain national or local tradition. Yet, the concept of versification here is not only referring to the grandiosely established literary tradition of Russia and of the Soviet Union, and not only to the freer approach to it initiated by the avant-gardes (in primis, the Futurists), who experimented with the interrelations between sound and language by treating language as sonic material and vice versa. In a culturological and anthropological perspective, the discourse of Verichev greatly resonates with the already mentioned performative turn that Aleksey Yurchak recognizes in late Soviet society (and that we would address instead to Russian Soviet society only, as his work, de facto, does): by repeating, deploying, and re-composing what already exists in the normative language and in the surrounding field of information, the levels of signification multiply while apparently remaining anchored to the concrete references belonging to everyday life. Although Yurchak’s deductions are mainly drawn from the reality of Leningrad, forms of deconstruction Soviet language and ideology from within has been at various degrees appeared elsewhere since the late 1970s, most evidently in Moscow with the Conceptualist circle and with Sots Art. By reappropriating late Soviet ritualized speech, shimmering becomes a quality of artists’ positionalities and statements, formulating  ironic “new sincerities,” as conceptualist Dmitry Prigov named them, and emptiness (Monastyrskiy 1999: 58, 75.)

In the case of the New Composers, this performative strategy not only is applied to the sonic but leads also to a quite different realm: through this hypernormalized dynamic, a certain tension towards other possible worlds shimmers with nuances of science fiction and universalism. In his manifesto, Verichev comments on the supposedly abstract elements in the duo’s music: ”Even the concrete has many planes in the sphere of meaning, and these planes of meaning are like abstract elements of the entire Universe” (1983). Explaining New Artists’ novel principle of Recomposition, Timur Novikov suggested that his experiments with Igorʹ Verichev played a major role, although he never clearly admitted the originality of the musician’s thought in shaping the new direction of New Artists: “Verichev is not only a musician but also an outstanding theorist. His article ‘Versification of Information’ (…) was a very important theoretical study in this field” (Novikov 1996). From the carnivalesque everythingness, a more mature compositional principle has taken form, which, while preserving its transgressive approach, aspired to modernize the Suprematist spirit of the avant-gardes towards the superlative and infinite. The experiments of the New Composers, focusing on rhythm and montage, clearly developed the ideas of the cinema of the 1920s in their own contemporary way, in consonance with the general ideas that gave birth to the New Artists. More notably, their activity concretized the role of music and sound in the whole collective’s practice as the object of representation and discussion and in terms of artistic strategy and composition and as well. 

The interdisciplinary projects created by the New Artists certainly formed spaces of evasion, but they also formed spaces of possibility and of connection, concurring in creating a sonic fiction.

In this paper, sonic fiction is intended and used in a broader perspective than its Black origins to shed light on how supposedly volatile and innocuous sonic experiences are tightly intertwined with knowledge production, subject constitution, and materiality—also in late Soviet Russia, beyond the context the term has originated from. Comparing Verichev’s manifesto with Eshun’s writings reveals a shared fusion of cultural critique, science fiction, and a profound musical and sonic engagement, conveyed through speculative language and futuristic imagery. Despite the brevity of Verichev’s manifesto, one can readily discern a divergence from Eshun’s flamboyant use of nonlinear, hypertextual narratives and the coinage of neologisms aiming at reclaiming language from white music critics and transform the text into a sonic experience. In the solely version available to the author of this paper, Verichev’s text uses a more conventional linguistic approach although, amidst a section discussing the significance of unforeseen connections, the text plays with phonetic elements in a brief series of syllabic echoes of “byl by bil by byl by” [“would be would beat would be”. This artistic interplay (or mistyping error?) conveys Verichev’s concept of music—marked by the disintegration of connections, the discordance of meanings, and the stratification of structural layers—into a tangible textual embodiment.

The first dance parties

Collaborating with the collective, Verichev and Alakhov kept “recomposing” their hand-sampling mixes by recording noises, TV and radio broadcasts, cutting tapes into pieces, rearranging their order and experimenting with borrowed turntables and tape recorders from friends. Initially, everyone gathered in a narrower circle on Voinova Street, in Timur Novikov’s squat, to play music on Soviet Corvette turntables. The nature of such sonic events, although excitingly different from any other event in the city—and, as far as known at the given moment, in most parts of the Soviet Union­—followed the same relational patterns of collaboration and amalgamation of different disciplines, styles, thoughts, interventions altogether. Other creatives and especially Andrej and Aleksej Haas joined. Born Voronov, the brothers were friends and neighbors of Gur’yanov and started to curate events for a small public: the squat became a space where concerts and dances were an integral part of self-organized exhibitions, theatre plays and performances. Such activities intensified with the meeting of likeminded musicians abroad: when in 1986 Kuryokhin, Timur Novikov and other colleagues from the rock band Kino travelled to a festival in Riga and met DJ Westbam (a pioneer of Berlin techno and founder of Mayday raves, then still called Westfalia Bambatta), they realized that their sessions of sonic recompositions had some Western analogues.

Just a year before, DJ Westbam had published an influential article, “What is record art?”, in which he presents Djing as the art form of composing entirely new tracks from pre-existing records and, describing some of the techniques applied for such art, he cautiously establishes some correspondence to painting (Westbam 1985). Later, Novikov will recall this encounter: “Westbam was then in the business of creating new music from old music, what is now called a remake or remix. Theoretically, I had been doing so since the early 80’s and called it Recomposition. His music was very much in line with the developments I was making with the New Composers group” (Novikov 1996). Once again, one must consider Novikov’s inclination toward self-centered exaggerations and the distinction between the techniques cultivated with the New Composers and those employed by German DJs, both in terms of technical execution and genre. It is crucial to acknowledge that during the era in question, conventional Djing skills, as we conceive of them today, were notably absent among Fontanka’s inhabitants. Promoter and DJ Mikhail Vorontsov attests to this, stating: “they would put a song from a record, and then try to mix it somehow with the cassette” (Azelitskiy and Ivanov 2007: 27). Additionally, early raves in Leningrad predominantly featured disco and acid house music, with only sporadic elements of techno.

Nonetheless, a discernible resonance emerges between the artistic appeals of Westbam and the Versification of the New Composers, both asserting their status as art forms and affirming their alignment with the fundamental principles of postmodern art. This resonance is characterized by a shared poetics of composition, marked by the transformative utilization of pre-existing material to create innovative works defined by recurring patterns, rhythmic cadences, and the incorporation of repetitions and loops (although repetitions in the Leningrad group were much less stringent than its Western counterpart.) Both realms also exhibit a penchant for infusing futuristic auditory landscapes into their creations. Techno music and the New Composers’ Versification share these common features but diverge significantly not only in their references on media and culture, but also in their technological approaches. While the New Composers in Leningrad could rely only on tape recorders and limited hardware gears, Western techno producers relied heavily on electronic synthesis and synthesizers. This distinction results in a more relentless rhythmic quality, characterized by a four-on-the-floor beat and a higher BPM, enhanced minimalism, and a sound closer to industrial and mechanical dystopia rather than utopian elements (Reynolds 2012).

Science Fiction Club

In 1987, the New Composers established the Science Fiction Club at the Leningrad Planetarium, where they experimented with sound and image to create scientific and musical lectures for kids. In the feature film I’m coming, Rhythm [Idu, Ritm] (1988), the group edited and hand-colored fragments of a black and white popular science film, musicking it with samples of the synthesized voice of a Soviet radio announcer repeating the phrase “two hundred and two. I’m moving with the rhythm.” The film On the Car [Na mashine] (1988) was also made from the remains of a decommissioned film from the Lennauchfilm studio, hand-colored and voiced by a sample from a popular song performed by Romanian singer Dan Spătaru. Thanks to the Science Fiction Club, the Planetarium, hosting curious visitors and school groups in the day, was used to hold semi-official parties at night, mixing records and their sci-fi productions in a cosmic surrounding. In this frame, the audio-video performance Contacts of the Third Kind [Kontakty tret’yego roda] in 1989 was the first work openly dedicated to an adult public, becoming their most successful output, greatly reviving the topos of interstellar life that characterized early cosmism.

Alakhov and Verichev were seriously engaged with astronomic topics and science fiction, using their artistic skills to create works filled with splinters of field recording, official news and entertainment programs, and purely fictional narratives. Yet, they were not deprived of irony and épatage, which had been amplified by the contribution and re-elaboration of the irreverent characters of Novikov, Mamyshev-Monro and many other New Artists members, according to the participatory nature of their collective practice. With the birth of New Composers, and especially with the foundation of the Science Fiction Club, a new form of fiction was injected into the unofficial circles. Formulated within the duo, it soon diffused in the whole artistic group, expanding from sonic works to video and visual output: Viktor Tsoy’s paintings show here and there space shuttles floating in the background of his concert-like landscapes; a space satellite ready to take off is at the center of Timur Novikov’s silk-screen printing named Start (1989), the same name of the album born from the collaboration of New Composers with some members of Kino in 1987; the collaborative painting of Gur’yanov and Verichev, already in 1983, depicts a sci-fi scene under the title of Kosmos. The list of artworks, performances, video- and sound-works constellated by sci-fi references, and especially spaceships able to catapult the listener and the viewer into another space, is as rich as deeply rooted in previous cultural traditions.

Rielaborations of cosmists topoi

The Universe has long been a particular object of interest in the culture of Russian Empire and later in Soviet culture, but it is since the end of the 19^th century, with the works of Nikolay Fyodorov, that this interest has become a current uniting philosophers, scientists, and artists in a common cosmic teleological vision, lately named cosmism. Originally amalgamating elements rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition and social engagement with modern science and technology, Fyodorov’s theory was founded on an unwavering belief in the advancement of intellect and science, which, in his opinion, would not only have regenerated the planet by permanently stopping the occurrence of natural calamities, but would also have supported mankind’s “common cause” of defeating pain and death, resurrecting the ancestors through autotrophism, and even colonizing the macrocosm of Space in harmony and prosperity with all the existing beings.  During his life, Fyodorov’s cosmism remained rather unknown to general public, yet he was revered by various philosophers and cultural figures like Tolstoj and Dostoevskij, and by internationally renowned scientists such as Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy who in 1903, under the influence of Fyodorov, published The exploration of outer space using jet engines, the first treatise on space flight that influenced rocket scientists across Europe and the US. Being rediscovered only in the years in the run-up to and following the 1917 revolution—and very likely influencing some of the first Bolshevik ideologues—Fyodorov’s theories had been marginalized and labelled as reactionary by the Stalinist dictatorship. Nevertheless, the cosmist narrative had taken root in the Soviet imagination in the intelligentsiya and popular culture alike, shaping a whole imagery of science fiction populated by Tsiolkovskiy’s spaceship and cosmonauts, as well as catalyzing philosophical, artistic and scientific endeavors towards space exploration, not without being absorbed and developed in the government’s militaristic and political interests during the Cold War’s space race, becoming another tool for cultural diffusion of colonialist imagery.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, while sci-fi imagery persisted in literature and cinema and space technology continued to be implemented, the romanticized ideals of cosmism faced practical challenges and a more nuanced public perception compared to the previous decades. In an atmosphere where the official rhetoric’s grandeur had been worn out and in which the lack of access to technological devices widely available to the West was rather obvious, the mythology surrounding the space technology and fantasy had to face economic strains, Gorbachev’s prioritization on immediate economic and political challenges, and in general a milder competition of the Space Race, partially replaced by international collaborations in space projects. The New Composers’ revival of cosmist topics with works such as Contacts of the Third Kind was undoubtably marked by a certain irony, yet it reflects alienation and aspiration for a utopic future where otherness was looked at sympathetically. If Afrofuturism explores the topic of “alien” and “other” in a high-tech cosmic future to reclaim black identities and perspectives, the New Composers’ space fiction reclaims the space for the individual desires and relationships from a deeply collectivist society worn out of values and aims, not without irony, nostalgia, and some vague notes of pop mysticism of cosmist origins (an analogue example of this introspective development of sci-fi can be traced in the books of Arkadiy and Boris Strugatskiy and movies inspired by them such as Andrey Tarkovskiy’s Stalker in 1979, the works of great composer Eduard Artem’yev, or the early works of Soviet Latvian group Zodiak and the group Forum.) Despite the self-ironic tone, these reappropriations in live indeed promoted the creation of a fictional world that through music –video, dance and art—transcended the Iron Curtain’s borders and extended to the Cosmic Space, a conceptual space of freedom for each owns’ self-expression that encompassed sexual identity as well.

Queer-friendly parties, Tanzpol and Pirate Television

The clearest example of such liberatory reclaim happened in 1989, when the New Artists organized an evening with DJs Westbam, Janis and others at the Culture House of the Workers. The coming-out of Novikov happened during the same year and the event, allegedly for the first time in Russian history, openly encouraged the participation of sexual minorities, hosting as main act a singing show for artist drag queenssuch as Denis Egelskiy portraying Tina Turner, a certain Kolya nicknamed Nicoletta, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monro and others. The article 121 of the Criminal Code for sodomy would only be repealed in 1993, and the action, although surely having a touch of defiance per se, indeed provided a liberatory space for diverse and marginalised subjects in a structure of the city.

The parties organized by the circle of Novikov became very popular in the underground scene in 1989 and 1990, when they occupied the famous squat in Fontanka 145, soon becoming both an art center and techno club colloquially referred to as Tanzpol (dancefloor). The events, combining sound, artworks, performances, drag and extravagant disguises between dances, singing and theatrical sketches, preserved their inclusivity to queer participants, who were treated preferentially at the entrance, not without a growing flair of underground elitism (Novikov 1996).

Sonic fictions in desire production and corporeality

In the previous sections, the concept of sonic fiction has been introduced in its original context, its later broader theoretical sense, and in terms of speculative writing. Although a deeper analysis of such aspects would grant a great insight, a focus on the material and sensorial sonic experiences affecting social, artistic and interpersonal dynamics is perhaps more appropriate in observing how, also in a very different space such as that of late Soviet Russia, sonic fictions are able to proliferate new worlds in the imagination of less socially accepted communities. Sonic (or Phono) Fiction does so since its inception by magnifying the intersections between sound and science fiction, where sound pieces become “sonar systems” turning minds “into a universe, an innerspace through which you the headphonaut are travelling. You become an alien astronaut at the flightdeck controls” (Eshun 1998: 133.) The imagery of Gagarin, the Sputnik zhizni celebrated by New Composers, or the spaceships appearing in the visual works of Tsoy, Novikov or Gur’yanov, suggest the possibility to bring humans into another space as much as Eshun’s audioships (1998: 25), focusing particularly on the act of flying away, rather than describing in detail the features of the final destination. Such focus on movement and the process of traveling rejects the crystallization of a model of Utopia to reach, subject to obsolescence, opening up instead a wide horizon of potentiality, or “possibility spaces with a plan for getting out of jail free” (Eshun 1998: 103.) Lying between possibility and the hic et nunc, sonic fiction is more concerned about spaces of desiring production (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 11) that, from the contingencies and signifiers of the present, project themselves to an undefined future to come back to the present.

“Moving through living space, real-world environments that are already alien. Operating instructions for the escape route from yourself. Overthrow the Internal Empire of your head. Secede from the stupidity of intelligence, the inertia of good taste, the rigor mortis of cool. You're born into a rigged prison which the jailors term Real Life. Sonic fiction is the manual for your own offworld break-out, reentry program, for entering Earth's orbit and touching down on the landing strip of your senses.”

(Eshun 1998: 103)

If Eshun’s sonic fiction engages with and stems from the recognition of a positivistically inclined modernism typical of Western capitalism as the fiction par excellence (Holt 2020), the New Artists’ reformulation stems from another modernistic tradition, that of avant-gardes and constructivism, socialistic rationalism, and the utopian desire for a future new humanity sustained by technology and socialistic principles. This is concomitant to the cosmist belief in posthuman technological development, a belief that instigated scientific and artistic research, but also fueled unconditioned trust in militaristic (and even messianic and esoteric) rhetoric in the years following the Stalinist period. In both cases, the aim is that of reappropriating such fictions and their languages, while reclaiming a space for voicing, sounding and dancing new subjectivities. Following such strain of sonic thinking, this form of fiction does not anticipate the future in messianic terms as the promise of cosmism did; rather, it shapes it by producing new subjectivities with new desires, thus acting as a propulsor and liberation force from a reality flattened and limited from the outside. To expand the concept of sonic fiction beyond postcolonial Black cultures might allow us to use it as both a tool and object of inquiry, as a heuristic tool.

The groundwork for the liberatory travel to happen—and for such an epistemological shift to begin—doesn’t reside then in the abstraction of a promised land, but rather in the pure materiality of sonic experience and in its bodily perception. Sonic fiction operates primarily in the substantiality of the real world through a “sensation transference” from the sonic impulse and its surrounding to the physical and psychological affect it has on the individual. By generating new sensory reality patterns (Eshun 1998: 103, 121), this sensation transference enables the individual to unlearn and reprogram ways to perceive the world and the self.

In his memoirs, Andrey Haas recalls one of the first sonic experiences during the parties organized with New Artists:

“The body was now responding to the sounds itself. Thick, low-frequency waves embraced him, and as he closed his eyes, he floated in them as in tangible matter. The flexibility and refinement of his movements spiraled out of his spine. The most unexpected parts of his body began to be perceived: he felt his feet, his shoulder blades, his collarbones. (…) Everything that followed was like one beautiful and endless dream. Andrei lived an incredibly vivid and at the same time illusory reality, seeing only vague shadows, eyes, movements, and the music itself in front of him. He merged with the sound around him, that transformed him into an airy being. He really would have wanted to share with someone at least part of the endless rapture that was bursting from inside him. He woke up only when the music stopped and the bright lights switched on.”

(Haas 2011: 70)

Haas' account may strike a chord with Western readers and audiences. However, when we explore foundational rave culture genres like house music, we uncover a complex interplay between the pursuit of self-identity and self-expression on one side and the surrender of control on the other that mirrors the intricate dynamics within the Black gay community and individuals who felt estranged from organized religion due to their sexuality. In this sense, house music and the successive genres within rave culture often served as a powerful source of community mainly for LGBTQ+ people  (Reynolds 2012). Although in a different context, it's conceivable that analogous sentiments were shared or actively sought by the stylish squatters of Fontanka 145 in their drag queen shows and queer-friendly soirées, that provided a safe space of joyful resistance for all the "humiliated and insulted" at the time in which sexual minorities were not yet legalized (Novikov 1996.) ^[1]

The psychoacoustic and psychedelic episode described by Haas promptly directs our attention on how sonic effects and affects operate not only at the level of intellect or imagination, but how it functions through the body in its entirety. The corporeal, for Eshun, is not at the antipodes of the cerebral, nor does the brain alone have the prerogative of perceiving and apprehending sound. Instead, the body is a large, distributed mind able to think and feel as a whole, tuning in with the alternating textural, melodic, and rhythmical inputs to the point that it “drastically collapses and reorganizes the sensorial hierarchy” (1998: 22).

In delineating her concept of sonic possible worlds, Salomé Voegelin moves exactly from sonic and corporeal sensibilities to explore a sonic fiction rooted in bodily listening rather than sociopolitical or historical framings (2021: 183):

“The sound artwork as sonic fiction is a phenomenological, a generative fiction, rather than a referential fiction. It is designed from the actions of its own materiality, not as description or reference of an object, a source, but as sound itself; we inhabit this materiality intersubjectively, reciprocating its agency in the sensory-motor action of listening as a movement toward what it is we hear.”

(Voegelin 2021: 51)

Triggered by sensory experiences, the affective topography described by Haas is phenomenological and anchored in the materiality of its contingent circumstances. In this perspective, the listener can be described as an instrument rather than a passive receptacle of sound, mediating its passage from the source to the body and back, in an everchanging loop. Sonic agency is not determined solely by political, social, or cultural factors, but also by the diffused, subtle perception of soundwaves.

This effect is amplified by the effect of samples’ mixing and manipulation that George Clinton defines as mixadelics, or a psychedelics of the tape-mixing that elicits fictions to multiply into audio-lifeforms that are able to transport the listener to another universe (Eshun 1998: 145). As for Clinton, the use of tape loop multitrack techniques was adopted also by the New Composers, who described this compositional process as Versification instead of fiction, and confer to sound an informative value. Despite avoiding directly politicized statements, Eshun also delineates a similar role, assigning to mixadelics an agency “that switches on the social machines which generate the 'operative signals directing modern life’” (ibid.)

Despite the wide-ranging, inventive nature of Afrofuturistic projects, a common thread among most of them is their ability to weave narratives that transcend conventional boundaries. Sun Ra, an iconic Afrofuturist figure, famously asserted that he hailed from Saturn, assuming the role of an otherworldly emissary on a mission of peace, a narrative that found its cinematic manifestation in the renowned film Space Is the Place (1974.) Similarly, the musical ensemble Drexciya ventured into the realm of nautical Afrofuturism, crafting an enthralling mythos centered on an underwater nation inhabited by the unborn offspring of African women who tragically met their fate at sea during the transatlantic slave trade.

In contrast, the creative expressions of Alakhov and Verichev appear to deviate from traditional narrative constructs. Their artistic focus leans heavily toward the poetic form itself, highlighting the intricate interplay between sound and the form of its compositional structure. This prioritization accentuates the sonic and formal/structural aspects of their art as intrinsic sources of information, ultimately steering them away from traditional narrative-driven approaches. As Versification of Information claims:

”Any coherent narrative or symbolic interpretation of such music enters into an inevitable contradiction with the very principle of its construction, the essence of which consists in the destruction of connections, in the discordance of meanings and structural layers. The absence of a special semantic superstructure in a musical work ensures its direct access to reality, and thus to a vast space with ideas, clashes of views and positions existing in it. The most important thing is that the meaning is not closed in on itself.”

(Verichev 1983)

The event took place mainly with the support of his colleague Vladislav Mamyshev-Monro (1969-2013), named after his artistic persona dressed as Marilyn Monroe, and member of the group since a few years. Mamyshev-Monro had been collaborating with Pop Mechanics since 1986 and, amongst his various artistic projects, he often included sound and music in his transformist performances. In 1989, together with artist Yuris Lesnik and Yuriy Kasparyan from the rock band Kino at Fontanka 145, “Vladik” Monro decided to record a music video for his cover of January blizzard is ringing [Zvenit yanvarskaya v’yuga], a song from Leonid Gayday’s 1973 cult comic movie “Ivan Vasil’yevich changes his profession” inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Ivan Vasil’yevich. Monro “performed” to the soundtrack, impersonating in front of the camera the movie’s actress Natal’ya Seleznyova while bathing and dancing sensually in lingerie. This is how Monro introduced video art into the activity of the New Artists, who started to co-produce videos of different scenes with Monro and Lesnik.

Soon Pirate Television was born, referred to as the first independent television company in the country not only with ironic tones, but also for the initial intention to broadcast the Pirate Television by breaking through the official broadcasts: according to Monro, in fact, with Pirate Television ”there was a fixed idea that it was necessary to infiltrate” society (Monro and Shein 2013: 330). Pirate TV, mingled performance, theatrical sketches and sound in a project that progressively parodied official television in a psychedelic and liberating language. Among the videos, often conducted by the different personae of Monro, the musical program “top five” stands out, where a presenter covered only by a bikini made of records presented music videos made by the group itself, often to accompany tracks of the New Composers. This is the case of Right today and right now [Imenno segodnya I imenno seychas] (1989), where footages of the artistic collective in the streets of Leningrad mingled with images of paper collages made ad-hoc for the videoclip in an ironic self-representation of their own group. Although the VHS copies of Pirate TV were mainly distributed among colleagues and friends of the circle, such music clips have become a peculiar and effective tool of symbolic infiltration in the mainstream production of music tv channels. A clear example of this is the presentation of Sputnik zhizni  (literally translated as “Sputnik of life” or “Satellite of life”), a title that both hints ironically to the life-giving force of the cosmos and to the idiomatic expression meaning “life-companion” or “spouse.”  Sputnik zhizni was recorded by New Composers in 1990 with the fortunate support of Ark Records, a Liverpool-based label. While the mastered track achieved a degree of success, its popularity was playfully overstated on Pirate TV in the introduction by Monro, who humorously proclaimed it to be the biggest hit in all of Europe. The video, amongst collages of archival and mass media films, showed the New Composers dancing in red clothing while holding a big red hammer with a sickle and waving a giant red star, both symbol of the cosmic space and of Communism.

De facto, the group’s parties gained recognition throughout the whole country one year later at the renamed Gagarin party—in honor of the first man in space­. Nevertheless, in its DIY aesthetic, Sputnik zhizni  is one of the greatest examples of how collaborative artistic approaches operating through sonic principles (namely, the theories of Recomposition and Versification of Information) was able to re-signify official imagery and collective memory in a new fictive space between styob, desire-production of futuristic otherness, and revindication of the subject from within the official discourse.

Body, affect and community

Equally reticent on taking an openly political stance and, rather, aggregating with the declared intention to solely be and experience together, also unofficial groups like the New Artists used operative signals directing modern life (in this case, samples from official and everyday life) that had a specific affect and agency on the hypernormalized discourse. This dynamic of capturing, rearranging, and multiplying codes is similar to the movements of de- and re- territorialization described by Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 10), able to modify and erode the fixity of a system from within by inhabiting it and exiting it at the same time. This phenomenon, according to Yurchak (2006: 144), has been possible thanks to the contingent nature of unofficial groups, whose gravitational point was the principle of obshcheniye (being together or experience togetherness). Obshcheniye, following his thought, can be described as a communal space where a common intersubjectivity is created by relationality, the ephemeral, and experiential aspects of being with others. This inoculated temporal, spatial, semantic, linguistic, scientific, biologic and other “elsewheres” into the immediacy of private lives, “producing the intense relation of ‘being outside’ the Soviet universe” (Yurchak 2006: 151)^[2]. The apparent contradiction in terms of political intentions suggested by Yurchak leads to a shift towards an understanding of togetherness and of its experientiality as constitutive element of circles like the New Artists, bringing us again to consider the relationship between agency and corporeality.

In analyzing what constitutes a community, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy affirms that coexistence is constantly, inescapably entailed in existence itself or, as one might say re-elaborating Heidegger’s thought, that being is necessarily a "being with" (Nancy 1991: 84).  This perspective not only emphasizes the need of communication, interaction, and exposure to one another, but also points at the in-betweenness of being a community, which is neither individual nor completely alien (Nancy 1991: XII). “Being with” is also indissolubly related to bodies and their materiality—whether animate or not—and thus, following Nancy’s thinking, the role of corporeal experiences and of participation is at the base of the ontology of being, since “outside of the community there is no experience” (1991: 20).

Under the light of Nancy’s perspective, Andrey Haas’ sensorial description of his floating fusion with sound and his subsequent need to share with his peers the desires sprung by such an experience, assigns a transcendental dimension to his sonic perception—connecting the multisensorial, identity building, and community-making—as well as to the New Artists’ collaborative and participatory practices of Everythingness and Recomposition. Also Eshun’s envision of bodies as distributed minds able to tune in with soundwaves, and thus becoming instruments themselves, assumes now a further level of signification, in both sensorial and social terms, bound to Nancy’s idea of communal bodies. In his book dedicated to the Corpus, the philosopher explains:

“Bodies are places of existence, and nothing exists without a place (…). Yet it is a skin, variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied, invaginated, exogastrulated, orificed, evasive, invaded, stretched, relaxed, excited, distressed, tied, untied. In these and thousands of other ways, the body makes room for existence (no “a priori forms of intuition” here, no “table of categories”: the transcendental resides in an indefinite modification and spacious modulation of skin.”

(Nancy 2008: 15)

The New Artists’ ubiquitous and self-ironic principle of absolute synthesis of the arts is thus extended to the realm of sonic materiality, of multisensoriality and of sonic agency, articulating afresh its appellation of “new avantgarde” of the empire’s dissolution, through an articulation of desire that turns into the sociopolitical realm. The sonic fiction of the Leningrad collective is not a tool of mere escapism. Rather, it is a process of de- and re-territorialization from within the system that, capturing its codes and re-signifying them through a surplus of meaning, had been able to generate spaces of invention and desire-production in which “new possible worlds are triggered”, even if just temporarily. Afrofuturism, and the sonic fiction derived from it, did certainly contribute to revendicate black subjectivities from a society marked by systemic discrimination and racism, but it didn’t eradicate them through a concrete political agenda, nor did it claim to. Parallelly, the sonic fiction created by New Artists and Composers didn’t realize the cosmist space on earth, nor create a society freed from ideology and political restrictions, although its mythology still marks the years of the end of USSR. The popularity of the Tanzpol reached the capital in 1991, when the Leningrad group was invited to play at VDNKh, a Soviet trade show and amusement park inhabited with pavilions dedicated to each Soviet Republic and to the main achievements of the Soviet Union, including the space missions. In December, 1991, the first rave party from Leningrad took place in the Cosmos pavilion, amongst installations of spaceships, planets and stars (see Khlobystin: 2017; Haas: 2011; Novikov: 1996). The event, taking its name from Gagarin, became so famous to be mistakenly regarded as the first rave in Russia: the proverbial Moscow-centric perspective of Soviet cultural politics and the branding strategy adopted by the Muscovite hosts for the occasion, might have concurred to such belief, along with the fact that the event was now, to all intents and purposes, official. After a successful debut in the capital with more than three thousand visitors, almost immediately clubs and parties began to pop up spontaneously in the city. As often in the years after the fall of Soviet Union, speculation and corruption put the club scene in other hands, while the New Composers distanced themselves from the scene and the New Artists, following Timur Novikov, dedicated themselves to new activities around the more conservative New Academy, founded around 1988-1989 (see Ippolitov and Kharitonova 2011). As Andrey Khlobystin, artist and art critic close to the Fontanka circle, wrote in 1989, “the artists of the older generation of ‘New’ artists were pioneers, missionary inventors. Now that the new artistic cosmos has been outlined, there comes a generation mastering it. Timur Novikov chose the theme of space, a winning and mastered one, as an assignment for his students at the Free University” (Khlobystin 2017: 142.) Nevertheless, and probably also for this reason, the Gagarin parties’ series is an important symbol of the new generation of young people in the 1990s—a generation whose identity rises between the mechanisms of the Soviet machine, mythologised liberatory movements from the underground, and the sudden breach of aggressive capitalism mingled with criminality—or, as the writer Pelevin called it, the Generation P.

Andrey Smirnov noted how the inventive enthusiasm of independent artists in the 1920s had a significant impact on Russian sociopolitical and cultural public awareness, before being dissipated by the Stalinist Terror.

Verichev, Alakhov, Novikov and Monro, in consonance with the generally hypernormalized mindset of their times, did not experiment in the hope of finding a ”miracle’” able to radically change the future, yet reflected on and engaged with the avant-gardes’ aspirations in a sardonic and post-modern language, thus creating artistic and sonic spaces that  focused on the processual, ephemeral, relational and sensorial aspects of the highly contextual hic et nunc, rather than distant utopias. Once the context changed, their practice lost a part of its raison d'être. Their project ended for political dynamics as well, but very different ones. Free spaces and spontaneous initiatives like Tanzpol constricted in the sudden shift to a scarily unregulated capitalist market and a diffused criminal organization able to appropriate and capitalize on their culture. In the Recomposition of such unchartered and troubled landscape, the liberatory voice at the core of their Versification started to stutter. The New Academy's styob inflected towards more conservative tones, at times in dangerous resonance with emerging figures like Dugin, whose influence transcends mere irreverence and symbolizes the rise of contemporary Russian new terror and schizofascism (Dalla Bontà 2024). This paper delves into the pivotal role of sound in the activities of the New Artists amid the collapse of the Soviet Union with the intent of highlighting the liberating impact of sound in their creative endeavors and particularly to shed light on the overlooked contributions of the New Composers to this cultural shift. However, neglecting to address the complex dynamics surrounding the New Academy during the 1990s would paint an incomplete picture of the group and of the fate of some figures in Russian musical and artistic underground. While certain artistic strategies succeeded in creating progressive spaces and impulses under Gorbachev, they proved ineffective in the transformed landscape of post-Soviet Russia, and even led to bolstering reactionary forces that are today in tight contact with the ruling power. A forthcoming publication in the Journal of Sonic Studies (Dalla Bontà: 2024) will further explore this subsequent phase, endeavoring to offer an insightful overview of the intricate dynamics driving this seemingly contradictory development. As for the New Composers, they progressively detached from a scene that didn’t reflect the spirit of their practice and relational atmosphere, withdrew from clubs and focused on producing concept albums centered around cosmist themes. In their 2011 release, "Pogoda," they included a track featuring, amongst cut outs of the news announcement of Gagarin’s triumph, the same deep voice of 1983 ”Cosmic space.” The voice, likely that of radio announcer Yuri Levitan, resonates with the opening lines of a song based on Konstantin Vanshenkin’s poem. The song was largely cherished across the Soviet Union for its celebration of human connection and the affirmation of life, and it is said that Yuri Gagarin himself requested this very song to be played during his historic flight in 1961, drawing strength from its heartfelt words: "I love you, life..."