Clothbound 72 page 25 x 14 cm book with two CDs.
CD1: The Symphony of Sirens.In 1922 Arseni Avraamov composed and conducted a visionary public sound event, activating the entire port city of Baku: its factory sirens, the ships horns of the entire Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery, several full infantry regiments, trucks, seaplanes, 25 steam locomotives, an array of pitched whistles and several massive choirs. Constantly referenced but forever lost, this extraordinary event is here painstakingly reconstructed and spatialised to approximate the original experience.
Added to this are 39 other priceless sound works, including the legendary Victory over the Sun and other lost documents of Malevich, Dziga Vertov, Nikolai Foregger; his Orchestra of Noises, Sergei Prokofiev, El Lissitsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ivan Ignatyev & The Ego Futurist Group, Mikhail Matiushin, Alexei Kruchenykh, Georgi Yakoulov, Konstantin Melnikov, Igor Severyanin, Vasilisk Gnedov, Vladimir Kasyanov; The Futurist Circle, David Burliuk, Elena Guro, Olga Rozanova, H2SO4 Group, Simon Chikovani, The Nothingists, Vasily Kandinsky, Danil Harms, Igor Terent’ev, Mikhail Larionov, The Psycho-futurists group, Vasily Kamensky, Varvara Stepanova and Roman Jakobson.
CD2: Enthusiasm! The Dombass Symphony (1930) is possibly Dziga Vertov’s most revolutionary achievement: a symphony of abstract industrial noise for which a specially designed giant mobile recording system was constructed (it weighed over a ton) in order to capture the din of mines, furnaces and factories. For Vertov, the introduction of sound film didn’t mean talkies, but the opportunity to collage, montage and splice together constructions of pure environmental noise. In addition, this CD collects together for the first time a definitive library of original sound documents from the Russian Avantgarde: contemporary recordings of Alexander Mossolov, Julius Meytuss, Roman Jakobson, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lili Brik, David Burliuk, Sergei Esenin, Vasily Kamensky, Semen Kirsanov, V.I. Lenin, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexandra Kollontay, Leon Trotsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Ilya Ehrenburg, Marina Tsvetaeva, Naum Gabo, Noton Pevsner and Dmitri Shostakovich.
BOOK: A comprehensive overview of the complexity and breadth of the many early C20 Russian avantgarde movements, followed by detailed notes and contexts for the individual recordings – including summary biographies of the main actors; additional work notes about the process of the extraordinary Baku reconstruction; a bibliography, rare photographs, web research links, artwork, facsimiles of contemporary documents, a comparative timeline of European and Russian Avantgardes and the first English translation of an article by Avraamov about the symphony.