ELEKTRO MOSKVA

2013 | dir: Elena Tikhonova & Dominik Spritzendorfer | 89 min

“Electricity holds not one world, but many worlds. There are wars and sex, the cosmos is born there and dies there.”

“Everything that sounds or generates sounds has the right to be.”

Welcome to a weird and definitely wired world of avant-garde rock musicians, DIY circuit benders, vodka-swilling dealers and urban archaeologists/collectors, all fascinated with obsolete Soviet-era electronic synthesizers: primitive and ungainly beasts like the Polyvox, ESKO, Yunost and the fabulous ANS Photo-Electronic Synthesizer, a surreal device that translates abstract drawings into sound. This strange universe of “cosmic chill-out tunes,” Space Age dance music and electronic chirps & tweets has been rescued by directors Elena Tikhonova and Dominik Spritzendorfer in this fascinating & cheeky documentary incorporating rare archival footage including the last 1993 interview with famed inventor Leon Theremin.

In a bizarre twist, many of these instruments were a by-product of the Soviet military and KGB, created in the off- hours by scientist/inventors cobbling together spare transistors and wires to make their own synthesizers — including Theremin’s Rube Goldberg-esque “Rhythmicon” from 1932, the world’s first rhythm machine, described by a museum curator as “space wreckage.” A new generation of Russian avant-garde musicians has embraced the unpredictability and chaos of these instruments: as “Benzo” (aka Richardas Norvila) admiringly says, “On a Western device, you push a button and get a result … On a Soviet instrument, you push a button and get something.”

Rooting through discarded storage units for cracked and yellowing keyboards, pulling apart cheap toys and re-wiring their inanely cheerful voice boards, these guerilla circuit benders are creating new cosmic sounds from these forgotten “instruments with expanded abilities.”