Happy to hear Musical Offering (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR326CD) – a compilation of five Russian composers all performing their work on the famed ANS synthesiser created and developed by Evgeny Murzin.
I expect most of you reading know all about this odd instrument, one of a number of 20th-century electronic music devices that didn’t quite achieve the same ubiquity as, say, the Moog synth or the Synthi AKS. Other such nearly-famous machines might include the Ondes Martenot, the Trautonium, and of course the Theremin – everyone’s favourite because of its few appearances on Hollywood movie soundtracks. That said, the ANS is also cemented into cinema history, thanks to the great Eduard Artemyev and his excellent soundtracks for Solaris, Stalker, and other films by Tarkovsky. So far this is common knowledge, I hope. But I’ve always been a bit hazy about how the ANS actually works, so it’s been interesting to read the scant notes here about grooved glass discs, how a composer can “draw” the music without writing a score, and the core of its operation – the projection of light through the glass disks onto the photo-sensitive cells, which converts light into electricity, and triggers the filters, amplifiers, and tone generators of the ANS. A similar method was used by Daphne Oram in this country, who began developing her “Oramics” systems around 1959 in Kent – the principle was to draw and paint designs directly on 35mm film, and light projected through them could likewise be transformed into sounds when it hit her photo-electric cells. I think all of this goes back to one of the properties of film projected through a sound projector; the “optical strip” was printed alongside the images on the celluloid, and could be read by a device in the projector, thus producing music, synched dialogue, and sound effects.
The part of the procedure that’s essential, of course, is the decisions of the composer, what shapes and figures they might be creating as they draw and gesticulate on those mysterious grooved glass discs. Those spinning the wheels on this particular release are Eduard Artemyev (so prominent he that he gets two tracks), Oleg Buloshkin, Sofia Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov, and Alfred Schnittke. Schnittke is also of course a prolific composer for more conventional musical settings, orchestral and choral works alike abound from his doomy pen, so he might be the “outlier” in this particular pack. These recordings were all made around 1971, but for some reason never released on record until the Soviet state label Melodiya issued an LP by this title in 1990 – virtually unknown outside that country for a long time, although weirdly there seems be a 2016 bootleg of it from Malta. Cold Spring have done well to re-offer this release, even though it’s perhaps a little uncharacteristic of the label’s output, excepting maybe a reissue of a Penderecki classic Kosmogonia which they did in 2017.
Interestingly, the Cold Spring press does pick up on a lesser-known aspect of the ANS which ties it into the sort of music they’re more at home with, that of Coil, Clock DVA and The Anti-Group Communications, all of whom have dabbled with the instrument. Me, I’d just love to have more of a sense of how this brute of a device made its mark in the history of Russian music, or in the international movement of electronic music generally – how did the ANS affect the culture? It doesn’t seem to have quite the same impact as the work of the Columbia-Princeton Music Center, for instance, or the Mills College. Even the instrument itself seems to have been neglected by the state, moving from the Scriabin Museum to the state University, and it was only saved from destruction by a conscientious colleague at that Institute. Even the sole surviving device at the Glinka Museum is not the original, but a remake.
Well, I seem to have run my way through this superficial history lesson without saying very much about the music or the sounds; well, they are uniformly very odd, unusual, alien, and extremely cold and distant. Even the usual “outer space” associations we tend to make about electronic music are far surpassed by the deep-galaxy explorations of these 1971 blasts, bereft of anything familiar to a human ear, and certainly unblemished by any of the old-fashioned musical nonsense like melody, rhythm, harmony, or tone. Instead, astonishing vapours and nebulae pass across the arena like so many microbes, microbes the size of planets inside their own mysterious universe, which operates by its own unknown laws. The soundtrack to Stalker, for instance, is positively benign by comparison, a crowd-pleaser, more like a Tangerine Dream LP or a John Carpenter soundtrack; for the hard-core, ascetic experimentation that, for one brief moment, evidently flourished in the Soviet Union, you need to check out these six austere cuts, and prepare for a lifetime of unrest. One can’t help thinking that the ANS synthesizer must have been a remarkably obstinate and unresponsive device, and that each composer had to push very hard against an unyielding surface (a glass ceiling, in fact) to achieve these subtle washed-out tones of eeriness. However, I expect I’m 100% wrong in this supposition.
New digipak art by Abby Helasdottir will make you think you’re in for something much more cool, hip, fun, and enjoyable, but wait until the headphones are securely in place before you choose this as your next party album. An earlier incarnation of this release was noted by nausika in 2015 here.