Eurock.com - Music from around the World: Features and Reviews

In the late 60's and 70's, postmodern art and music were a progressive step away from conformity. Later there was an attempt to merge those forms with a lifestyle more attuned to consumption and relaxation. Now a new norm has deflated the whole scene, protest centers around bringing back fundamental values. In fact, Post Realism centers on the idea of getting back to the avant-garde culture and traditions of the XX century.

In today's world, true Art does not occupy the place it did in the last century. At that time art was a form of religion, the role of the artist in society was equal to, and even surpassed the role of the writer, philosopher, and especially politician. Since then, Art has fallen from its pedestal. Post-modern art does not even attempt to work as cultural protest against the present order of things; now instead it serves as a utilitarian sonic background, striving instead to become a form of entertainment.

With the onset of the era of consumption and mass culture, artists must uphold the value and purpose of the Art like never before. An artist is someone who reflects reality. To paraphrase a key phrase of Stanislavski: "Artist - this is not a diagnosis; the artist is the one who sets the diagnosis to the society."

Chekalin continues this tradition of 20th century Art. His music directly epitomizes this. It is not socialist realism, but a form of surrealism created in the context of modernity. It may seem strange, yet it is certainly true that Art of XX century was futuristic and has proven to be more modern than that of XXI. Digitization and advanced technology cannot replicate true human artistic creativity, which when manifested becomes revolutionary by its own nature. The idea of social revolution may be gone, but the inspiration that art (and first of all music) can provide are eternal.

MIR Records Catalog 2012

"Chekalin's Music is like Shostakovich, for the Electronica Generation"

In the West, the life of an artist has not always been easy but there has always been some garage, studio, and some company or arts patron who lent them their ear and sometimes the capital to make their dream happen. Even for those opting out of the trek down the yellow brick road to artistic commerce and the dream of stardom, it was always relatively inexpensive for creative types to acquire modest technical and equipment necessities to do their own thing for the sake of their art. Alternatively, imagine if you can, life in the Eastern Bloc, living in a land not so full of good and plenty, where a watchful eye was always peering just over your shoulder at what you are doing. After more than 3 decades the works of Mikhail Chekalin are now finally seeing the light of day in the Western world as perhaps he had always hoped for, and dare I say at times would have never imagined possible as he did his thing in the former USSR.

MIR Records was established as a side project devoted to exposing the Music, Art and Film of Mikhail Chekalin. To date 3 CDs and 4 DVDs have been produced featuring not only his latest, but also historical works from his archives that have been preserved over the past 35 years. To shed some light on the actual man and the road he travelled in terms of creating his art, Mikhail shared the following insights with Eurock about his life, their message, and the social/ political conditions under which he worked to create his unique and diverse works of art.

Is it true that the KGB destroyed your film studio?

Well that would seem to be an oversimplification, of sorts, to state that it was the KGB that dumped scalding water into my studio located in the basement floor. That did happen however in 1987 and effectively put an end to my studios activities (it was not a film studio exactly speaking, but more a multi-dimensional art-work enterprise-workshop engaged in a variety of artistic activities which even included teaching plastic & graphic arts to young children (to provide a legitimate reason to exits of a formal sort). That destructive act happened just when the Studios acquired a legal status in its own right at last and had been officially recognized.

It would not seem to be too far-fetched however to consider this terminal event as an effect harking back to its cause in the year 1979 when I had been asked to present myself at the KGB, on the very same street where it is located now. At that point it was my professional career that they tried their best to stop. It was years later when Glasnost had come to pass that I became fully aware why they should have felt interested in me as I was always far enough from politics.

In the 1990s it was made known to the general public that the people at Lubjanka Street had got their direct orders from Yuri Andropov to investigate each and every promising young person involved in all kinds of creative activities and especially in liberal arts, such as music, art and literature - to make sure of their ideological predisposition - that is, that they were not up to something. And you need not be too surprised at the apparent immensity of the task as their authority was absolute, and their reputation is legion.

The reason underlying it was that the Soviet cultures predominant function was a strictly conservative-protective one and modernity, or popular culture was become exclusively associated with the West. The West during the Cold War Epoch was therefore a potential enemy at the very least, an actual enemy in terms of image and influence by all means.

So you can imagine their attitude towards young people who just liked to dance to good rock-n-roll music and to show off wearing long hair and blue jeans as a mark of social prestige in this country during the time of life behind the Iron Curtain. It was mostly highly placed state & party functionaries who were free to go abroad any time. Those like me, interested in Western culture in broader sense as it were, having always perceived the underlying unity of cultural heritage (liking to dance and to show off just as much as the next man, mind you!) naturally fell indiscriminately within the range of potentially political suspects.

Those at KGB were no fools however, they sorted people out deftly & carefully, putting lambs aside from the black sheep - and black sheep were destined for Afghanistan to serve their international duty, in the idiom of the epoch, or dispatched to mental clinics if they happened to be rejected.

Their only serious lack of judgment proved to be their failure to recognize that those of real intellectual and creative potential represented a national treasure rather than a national menace. Thus their earnest efforts went drastically askew, aiding the enemy in the long run, as the Soviet Union is no more as everyone now knows...

Save for this finer point they knew their trade quite well, they would not have been even rude to you, during the later epoch of Soviet Empire, they made use of sophisticated methods revealing their familiarity with recent developments in science... to put it shortly: they didn't break your bones; they just broke your life. For you became a marked man, for the rest of your days.

After my visit with the KGB, if I happened to have been asked for an interview by some Western newspaperman, the very next day someone from among my acquaintances would call to advise me, in no uncertain terms, that I should stay out of it. If I were to reply that I didn't give a damn about their well-meant advices, then I used to told, so, well, my music has been tape-recorded, and tapes circulated, I was surely aware that unsanctioned sound-recording activity is persecuted by law...

Thus the very music I made became cause for persecution when I had been expelled from the world of academic achievement as the phrase goes, and actually deprived of any legal opportunity to realize my work (what with a state monopoly stranglehold on sound-recording facilities) - all due to that evil visit to Lubjanka Street. It went reverberating on and on.

Even an opportunity to travel abroad was denied me. When for a while I performed as a keyboardist in a rather famous and quite official Soviet group The Samotsvety they went on tours and I had to be left behind. I went abroad in 1988 for the first time, to Prague, and with my Studio...

During what years did you do music & films in your studio?

My Studio (founded in 1978) actually existed up to 1993, until being destroyed by this act of sabotage, (an accident of boiling water, when the central heating allegedly burst into the basement floor). My studio just happened to be located at the heart of the downtown district, and thus presented a big attraction for those who were after immovable's and possessed of ways and means to get what they wanted.

Films that I made use of as art-video material for these DVDs have been executed with my own assistance, we worked as a team, as it were, but they haven't been actually produced by my Light Graphics Studio - so there are people whom I named in credits of these DVD videos: art producers, cameramen, cartoonists as concerns the animated films, scriptwriters etc.

Did you compose & perform all the music as part of the concept of the videos?

The Light and Sound collages were filmed at live installations during the 1970s and 1980s. All music was performed by me. The live symphonic concert by the St Petersburg Philharmonic was officially filmed with the orchestra conducting my music.

That long film with me and the city images features edited material so as to transform it into a pure visual art product not requiring any verbal reinforcements. I also re-titled it after one of the longer pieces used in it Music for the Voice, Synthesizer, Drums & Piano.

As I reconsider this in retrospect this basic concept or rather all-permeating feel of it could be construed as a work that evokes a feeling of estrangement, of dire alienation, of displacement almost literally embodied by that piano cast out upon the snow and that miserable old bones sweeping most absurdly around it (the scene has not been staged, by the way, it's a documentary, of sorts).

The animated cartoon entitled Exit is included here with the consent of the producer H. Porokova. The animated cartoon studio that produced it doesn't exist any more.

This film was based on Russian folklore, in a sense, or rather on world perception appropriate to folklore - which with us Russian folks tends to brood and gloom.

What with the desolation of life in the depressingly lowland area of Central Russia, not to mention that snow eternal and general lack of sunshine, we are much prone to introspection bordering on total introversion.

This animated film touches upon the basic issues in the course of human events - life and death, hope and fear, perseverance in the face of total senselessness and despair, etc...

The verbal message in the film is not absolutely literal and is conveyed, I trust, clearly enough by non-verbal means such as the very intonations and the context of the imagery. So I think the language isn't going to be major barrier to understanding the overall context and concept.

In essence, our Russian folklore-based perception tends to view somewhat skeptically the extent to which our Good Lord as Supreme Authority is willing to be annoyed by us petty mortals. This is the message of the fragment with God answering a prayer, seemingly quite happy with himself. So I suppose you might say that a social/ realist attitude is reflected in a good many of these films and my work...