New Composers

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • St. Petersburg 3.0

Presentation Title:
  • New Composers

Presenter(s):


Abstract:

  • The New Composers are 15 years old now. The project was formed in 1983 in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) on the base of a sound recording studio in the Drama Theatre, where Valery Alahov and lgor Verichev worked as sound producers and made soundtracks for performances. There the concept of their creation was worked out. As in performances, where the subject was the basic item, in New Composers albums the subject or conception was the defining factor, surrounded by a musical pallette, lyrics and technical sounds and effects. Finally the performance-collage was worked out. For example, the first album of the New Composers, Space Between, where the samples of Russian Cosmonauts, engineers, messengers, orders from space command centre, famous phrases of politics and scientists were used. The most frequent are the basic phrases, which the New Composers with the help of tape-montage ordered in another way, or changed the meaning, creating new lyrics. Well-known soviet songs or compositions were the musical material, phrases were combined or went in turn episodiacally. Owing to that way of creating, the project got its name – New Composers. Popular-science topics were the most frequent subject of the New Composers. Myths and legends gave fantasy freedom in using special effects or occasional tricks, which the New Composers created in their studio. ln 1997 the New Composers organised a club, Science-Fiction (in the Planetarium, Leningrad), where two popular-science lecture-compositions for children and adults were created: Contacts of the 3rd Way (about UF0’s) in 1988, and Legends of the Starry Sky in 1989. In 1990 the New Composers were invited to Ark Records in Liverpool, and their first single Sputnik was recorded. It became the first Techno single in the history of Russian dance club life and the New Composers became famous as the first Techno group in Russia.

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