Sergei Kuryokhin and Pop-Mekhanika on TV's "Musical Ring"

Making its debut in 1984, Musical Ring was a Perestroika-era Soviet television program, dedicated to showcasing new musical talent and fostering a live audience Q&A. This 1987 segment features composer and avant-garde jazz pianist Sergei Kuryokhin and his band Pop Mekhanika. Kuryokhin begins his performance by fulfilling the socially didactic imperative of Musical Ring as a Soviet educational program (kulturnoobrazovatel’naia programma) in explaining the stylistic language of his avant-garde jazz compositions to the audience [6:30 – 7:02]. Throughout the program there is a distinct triangulation of the audience (whose comments range from complimentary to openly antagonistic), the Soviet rock community, and the ostensibly impartial filming crew. For example, the camera zooms in on Marina Smirnova [9:17], the lead actress in Rashid Nugmanov’s The Needle, to gauge her reaction to an audience question. Similarly, a shot of a snickering Soviet rock historian Andrei Burlaka [23:13] further helps to manufacture controversy between the rock community and the public, foreshadowing the post-Soviet talk show genre, which became a referendum on cultural discourse and a mainstay of television mass culture of the Putin years. Additionally, the ritualized inscription of underground experimental music into the Russian literary canon and the broadly defined “Russian national idea” is another noteworthy feature of this episode: an audience member at one point compares the form and content in Kuryokhin’s work to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina [10:07], another references Mayakovsky [25:16], and a point of heated debate regarding Russian folklore yields an impassioned defense of Pop Mekhanika’s music as one of distinctly Russian musical heritage [21:48]. The program further serves to establish Kuryokhin as an artist firmly intent on mixing genres and styles in his music, expanding the sonic and compositional potentialities of Soviet rock-and-roll. He displays the full breadth of his stylistically amorphous musical project when he welcomes the members of the Leningrad Rock Club and the band Kino to join a chamber orchestra to perform his third composition [15:50]. The characteristic theatricality of Pop Mekhanika’s performances [27:50] morphs into experimental theater, that features a fashion show, stage sets, costumes, and audience participation. Throughout episode Kuryokhin artfully wields the postmodern rhetorical weapon of styob, seamlessly weaving formal musical discourse with farce, an artistic and communicative device that will become one of the defining modes of expression during perestroika and the early post-Soviet period.