Cybernetic Disco Party; or, Mapping a Geography of the Soviet Underground
Chapter in progress for Russia and Its Others: Transnational Musical Encounters, eds. Pauline Fairclough, Simon Morrison, and Peter Schmelz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
When discussing the Soviet musical underground, scholars have emphasized its transnational connections with the West. Sergei Zhuk, for example, points to the ways western music entered Soviet Ukraine, thereby contributing to the “Westernization of Soviet culture and Soviet ideological discourse” (Zhuk 2010, 9). Following recent work that treats transnationalism as a way of thinking about circulation rather than a strict methodological framework, however, I consider the implications of transnational flow within a single country—that is, the exchange of musical goods, genres, and technologies between center and periphery within the Soviet Union (Siegelbaum and Moch 2016; Péteri 2010; David-Fox 2011). In this essay, I focus on the emergence of electronic music and disco in the 1960s and 1970s. I begin by tracing the history of the Prometheus Institute, an official scientific-research institution that experimented with cybernetics and synesthesia in audio-visual art, based in Kazan. Protected by its status as a research institution, the Prometheus Institute was able to stage performances of Western electronic music like Varèse’s Poéme électronique that would have been all-but forbidden in aesthetic organizations like the Composers’ Union.
The Prometheus Institute thus invites an understanding of the musical underground complemented by ideas of circulation, feedback, and both trans- and intranational exchange. Rather than focus on the traditional vertical axis of the state versus the individual—between accepted and subversive—I suggest that we incorporate a horizontal axis that allows for institutional divisions and arrangements. A horizontal axis also allows for a greater consideration of center and periphery in the underground: the Prometheus Institute was undoubtedly aided by its distance from Moscow. A “geography of the underground,” then, allows us to map those relations and exchanges in ways that provide insight into how musical genres, styles, and materials made their way both into and throughout the Soviet Union. A geography of the underground, too, expands our understanding of the “overground”: the state-sanctioned, cultural “mainstream.” My essay thus concludes by exploring the connections between the Prometheus Institute and the emergence of disco in the Soviet Union. Rather than simply a (by)product of the West, disco was in part a homegrown genre—one that arose from scientific research institutions like the Prometheus Institute and metropolitan areas outside of Moscow and Leningrad.