https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyGiNQXggM
An episode of Kuryokhin’s radio program “Vasha liubimaia sobaka” (aka “Nasha malenkaia rybka,” aka “Russkii liudoed”).
Post-Soviet
1996
“Dogs” is the derogatory term that Jazz musicians used to dismiss the avant-garde performers he was so fond of back in the day, Kuryokhin explains in the first episode of what ended up being his last project: 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, “Vasha liubimaia sobaka” (Your favorite dog)—because “…we wanted our show to be very avant-garde, even extremist.” After his adventures in television and politics (see artifacts 205, 194), Kuryokhin goes back to music—and the definition of musical avant-garde or “extremism” that he comes up with for the show can help clarify the logic behind 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”—at any given time—but depending on the context such music could be that of Sex Pistols or that of Bach—because Bach sounded absolutely shocking for his time. As a result, Kuryokhin’s conception of art (and, as a consequence, politics) is fairly close to that of Russian formalist critics like Viktor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov: the evolution of the literary/artistic/political sphere is based on a continuous dialectic between tradition and avant-garde (to which Kuryokhin adds a third tendency—“the mainstream”) where one cannot exist without the other. In this context, Kuryokhin is consistently interested primarily in the most shocking and revolutionary genres, which are meant to “defamiliarize” and, therefore, to revitalize worn-out artistic (and political) strategies and devices (see also artifact 193). In the course of the 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 repeating, almost as a comical refrain, a group of adjectives conveying the highest possible degree of insanity, chaos, lack of restraint, “wildness,” and even stupidity (ogoltelyi, oshalevshii, dikii, otupevshii). As part of this search for novelty, Kuryokhin changed the name of the short-lived program (eleven episodes in total) a few times because he thought “it would be boring” for a show to be named always the same—it first became “Nasha malenkaia rybka” (Our little fish) and later, “Russkii liudoed” (The Russian cannibal). The second was a reference to the National Bolshevik retro-futurist surreal artist and pioneer of noise music, Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov (see artifact 188), around whom Kuryokhin created a whole mythology: nobody had seen him, but according to some rumors he was very old, covered in scars, and when some of his fans had tried to approach him, he had thrown hot mushroom soup at them (!). The program appeared to be conceived as an attempt at creating an avant-garde or “extremist” tradition. Along with the mythologies surrounding Lebedev-Frontov, the program’s guests included underground artists Dmitry Prigov and Sergey “Afrika” Bugaev—as well as Aleksandr Dugin (see artifacts 193, 194, 196). In the excerpt included here, the tradition in question is, in perfect Kuryokhin’s style, totally invented. The “Professor Vladimir Olegovich Volkov” in the show, who allegedly played 25-minute cacophonic solos and deafening noise music while at the same time performing with such Soviet melodic-patriotic artists like Leonid Utesov and Klavdiia Shulzhenko back in the 1950s and 1960s, was completely made up, as was the forgotten tradition of Soviet experimental music that Kuryokhin claims he represented (Volkov was in reality a close friend of Kuryokhin who played the part for the prank).
Saint Petersburg and Russia
Kuryokhin (Kurekhin), Sergei
Russia and former Soviet Union
Vasha liubimaia sobaka (Sergei Kurekhin i professor Volkov). Radio-1 Petrograd. 1996. [YouTube version: Курёхин и профессор Волков на Радио-1 (эфир 2/8)]