Moscow’s University’s Theramin Center preserves the only existing ANS photo-electronic musical instrument. The ANS (named after the initials of Scriabin), worked on the principle of reversing the normal process by which music is recorded on film soundtracks. A handful of Soviet composers clustered around this obscure project in the 1960s, and most of them subsequently became famous as orchestral or film score composers. This was during the “loose” period of Krushchev’s regime, when lots of creative projects flourished in obscure corners or science, music and academia.
There is currently a CD release from Electroshock Records, Electroshock Presents: Electroacoustic Music Volume IV: Archive Tapes Synthesizer ANS 1964 – 1971, which covers this period. There is an excellent, detailed review of it on the entertaining and informative site of Ingvar Loco Nordin*, an experimental music fan in Nykoping, Sweden. Navigate his site from there, because it contains lots of leads to interesting electronic and experimental music. Nordin notes that many of the pieces sound like they were lifted from a vinyl recording, and it happens that I have the original vinyl. It is a small-format Melodiya album with works by Artemyev, Kreichi, Nemtin, Kallosh composed on the ANS synthesizer. All of these men subsequently flourished as composers, mostly in film music. Artemyev is particularly known for his scores for Tarkovsky films. The most ambitious work on the record is a soundtrack item for the film “Cosmos”, a collaboration of Artemyev and Kreichi. However, a short piece by Kallosh, “Northern Tale’, strikes me as the most inventive. Most of these pieces still hold up fairly well, even though anyone could now easily synthesize similar sounds on their computer. A plodding, murky treatment of a Bach chorale prelude is an embarrassment, but everything else holds up well as music.
*Nordin’s site is no longer active.
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