Filed Under: "Only the Wildest and Craziest": Kuryokhin's Neo-Avant-Garde on the Russian Radio

"Only the Wildest and Craziest": Kuryokhin's Neo-Avant-Garde on the Russian Radio

In the first episode of what turned out to be his last project, Sergei Kuryokhin explained that “dogs” was the derogatory term jazz musicians used to dismiss avant-garde performers. This is why, Kuryokhin continues, he and his co-host Aleksandr Ustinov have decided to name their new radio show, broadcasted on Radio-1 Petrograd, “Your Favorite Dog [Vasha liubimaia sobaka]”—because “we wanted our show to be very avant-garde, even extremist.”

After his adventures in television and politics in the early to mid-1990s, Kuryokhin returned to music, articulating a definition of musical avant-garde or “extremism” that helps clarify his scandalous political and media performances. The music selected for the show, he explains, is supposed to be “the most extremist” and “the most avant-garde” of its time, but depending on context, that could mean the Sex Pistols or Bach—whose works sounded absolutely shocking to their respective contemporaries.

This definition aligns Kuryokhin’s conceptions of art and politics with those of Russian Formalist critics like Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) and Yuri Tynyanov (1894-1943). These thinkers understood the evolution of the literary-artistic-political sphere as based on a continuous dialectic between tradition and avant-garde, where the one cannot exist without the other (Kuryokhin augmented this duo with a third tendency—“the mainstream”). In this context, Kuryokhin is consistently interested in the most shocking and revolutionary genres, which are meant to “defamiliarize” (Shklovsky) and, therefore, revitalize worn-out artistic and political strategies and devices.

In the course of his radio show, Kuryokhin describes his favorite music—from industrial, post-industrial, and Japanese “noise terrorism” (shumovoi terror), to English dark folk, Tibetan chants, and klezmer—by reiterating, almost as a comical refrain, a group of adjectives conveying the highest possible degree of insanity (ogoltelyi), chaos (oshalevshii), wildness (dikii) and even stupidity (otupevshii). As part of this search for novelty, Kuryokhin repeatedly changed the name of the short-lived program, because he thought “it would be boring” for a show to always retain the same name. The program first became Nasha malenkaia rybka (Our little fish), and, later, Russkii liudoed (The Russian cannibal). The second of these names referred to National Bolshevik retro-futurist surreal artist and noise music pioneer Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov (1960-2022), around whom Kuryokhin created a whole mythology. Supposedly, nobody had seen him, but rumors described him as very old, covered in scars, and prone to throwing hot mushroom soup at his fans.

Kuryokhin evidently conceived his radio show as an attempt to create an avant-garde, “extremist” tradition. Alongside mythologized figures like Lebedev-Frontov, the program’s guests included underground artists Dmitry Prigov (1940-2007) and Sergey “Afrika” Bugaev (1966), as well as Alexander Dugin. In the episode featured here, the tradition in question is—in typical Kuryokhin style—totally invented. The episode’s guest was the fictional “Professor Vladimir Olegovich Volkov,” played by Kuryohkin’s close friend. The “Professor” allegedly played 25-minute cacophonic solos and deafening noise music while simultaneously performing with patriotic, mainstream Soviet-era artists like Leonid Utesov (1895-1982) and Klavdiya Shulzhenko (1906-1984) back in the 1950s and 1960s. Equally invented was the “forgotten” tradition of Soviet experimental music that Kuryokhin claims “Volkov” represented. As in his “Lenin-mushroom” prank, Kuryokhin reveals the ideological, or performative underpinnings of tradition itself while paradoxically highlighting the importance of creativity in the shaping of identity and collective memory.