Authors

Sam Riley¹;  ¹ University of Birmingham, UK

Discussion

In the British 1980s, the avant-garde was in crisis. English translations of work by theorists such as Peter Bürger (1984), among others, asserted that the vanguard had died its final death. The task was then set to find a way past this terminal inertia. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that artists and organisers began to look beyond Western Europe and a bracketed ‘high-brow’, in search of a solution. 

This paper follows a particular episode in this ‘crisis’, by tracing a history of independent label ARK Record’s relationship with Popular Mechanics -- a Soviet improvisation collective led by free jazz musician Sergei Kurekhin. For ARK, Popular Mechanics embodied an avant-garde ethos unlike anything in Britain, and thus began an ambitious collaboration. ‘A multi-media art/music assault on popular culture’ was planned through means of international communication. At first, the collaboration was a huge success: events such as Perestroika in the Avant-Garde (1989) offered the UK its ‘first glimpse of the simmering Soviet underground’. Yet, by 1991, the collaboration became attenuated by the crisis of Soviet dissolution. The project never reached its grand vision, but it did have one upshot: it saw the recording of Russia’s first techno single. This history is reconstructed from the inside, looking to ARKs archival documentation. This paper, then, traces a transnational encounter (with all its snags and glitches), but it also turns to the aesthetic encounter: avant-garde jazz meets the “historical” avant-garde; and both run into club culture.