Three Tune Tuesday #171 EN/RU

Kuryokhin was one of the most prominent figures of the Russian underground scene in the 80s. The boy's genius was already evident in school; Kuryokhin developed a career as a professional pianist and eventually became a real virtuoso - but he was unable to find his place, to "fit in" with the official-official structures. At first, he played in jazz bands, and in the early 80s - when Russian rock experienced a stage of rapid growth - he managed to play in many rock bands in St. Petersburg. In the second half of the 80s and early 90s, he assembled his own band called "Pop Mechanics" and gave concerts all over the world (but it cannot be called purely "musical"). It would not be an exaggeration to say that he lost interest in music as an art form (and in contemporary art in general, too), and the 90s saw his penetration into television - as a showman, screenwriter, talk show participant and politician.

'Insect culture' for me is one of his favorite and iconic releases, which I never get tired of returning to again and again. The recording was made in the distant and still very Soviet year of 1985 - before Perestroika! - in collaboration with sound artists Igor Verichev and Valery Alakhov (which formed the band 'NEW COMPOSERS') in the spirit of social art: it mixed in a pretty mocking manner sound collages from Soviet radio broadcasts, theater performances and film dialogs, phrases, intonations, rhythms and melodies painfully familiar to every Soviet person. Of course, the Soviet censorship did not approve and would never have passed such a release - the vinyl record was released in Europe in 1987... As "NME" reviewed this release, "POPULAR MECHANICS managed to penetrate the spirit of Dada and revive it much closer to the original than the popular, but exploiting only the fashionable imagery of the Dadaists and Futurists ART OF NOISE and CABARET VOLTAIRE did." (Needless to say that I am a big fan of Dada too.)

As the disc booklet reports, the main musical instrument used in creation of this work was a studio tape recorder (analogue and pretty primitive one), and the main material was sound recordings archives. Of course, they had no official access to it, and basically were stealing everything and everywhere they could, the plundering of the archives was carried out through acquaintances and was similar to a miracle of randomness. It is also worth keeping in mind that in said years, sampler technology was in its infancy, and this result was achieved with the help of painstaking manual work with tape recorder and film.

It is worth noting that the name "Pop Mechanics" was invented specifically to label the 'Insect Culture' release - but everybody enjoyed it so much that later it turned into the musician's trademark. The English publishers, as part of promotional activity, cut up a special dance remix, which was sheduled for 12" single release. Due to financial reasons, it never saw the light of day, but the recording survived time and was included as a bonus track into CD reissue. I am posting it here: 4 minutes of avant-garde and pure dadaism!