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[#195] SEKRET MACHINE MUSIC IV: Soviet Photosynths, Rockefeller Foundation Music, and the Cultural Cold War

In the fourth installment of Sekret Machine Music, Dimitri and Khalid explore early electronic music innovations on both sides of the Cold War during the 1950s and early 60s, including:

Electronic music as another front in the Cultural Cold War, Dimitri Shostakovich getting cancelled by Pravda for doing sicko bourgeois formalism in his Lady Macbeth Opera, Shostakovich’s connections to neo-Pagan counterrevolutionary suslord Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Soviet experiments in “drawn sound” throughout the 1930s-40s, the weird history of Yevgeny Murzin’s mysterious Soviet ANS synthesizer, its Theosophist namesake Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, Scriabin’s unfinished apocalyptic gesamtkunstwerk masterpiece “Mysterium”, Eduard Artemyev’s groundbreaking ANS scores for Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, and Roger Corman hiring Francis Ford Coppola to splice ANS sci-fi scores into Americanized B-movies in the 60s…

The rise of “foundation music” in post-war America, a gushing pipe of Rockefeller Foundation funding in a musical desert, how Sputnik triggered an existential panic/scientific inferiority complex in American institutions, heavy foundation support for atonal “serial tyranny” in university music departments, Milton Babbitt’s deranged “Who Cares If You Listen?” essay from 1958 where he calls for “complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition”, and the depth of Rockefeller Foundation support for the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, along with America’s first heckin’ DIY music space, the San Francisco Tape Music Center…

[#195] SEKRET MACHINE MUSIC IV: Soviet Photosynths, Rockefeller Foundation Music, and the Cultural Cold War

Comments

Jimmy has retired from podcasting

Subliminal Jihad

Wait are they saying that Jimmy Falungong is gone or just quit podcasting?

William Brame

Forgot to mention Beyerdynamic And you can tell I’ve gotten way too into recording stuff lately

NYCM&AHole

Know what’s crazy? All the high end microphone companies that are German or Austrian. AKG Telefunken Neumann Schoeps Sennheiser Austrian Audio Und am Ende: https://youtu.be/wqT1SxhyaKM?si=l4CrZen3ttDfCAt-

NYCM&AHole

There’s an interesting book or maybe just essay I just read recently called: “Lukacs and Socialist Realism" by J. Revai, who was a prominent member of the Hungarian Communist Party. I thought it was really great because not only was it a criticism between communists, but also it was the most informative work I’ve personally read into what socialist realism actually means to the people actually using it but also how socialist realism was being used, what the ontological context within it functions, and how it could be contradicted even by people who adhere to the ideology. I recommend it definitely.

Ltrsandnmbrs

days of turbins = play version of the white guard! Notably, the original title was changed because the play could not sympathize with or center the whites, ideologically, per censors. It was very different Than bulgakov’s original versions of the white guard, etc.

ampgorky

Audiobooks are inferior but they are better than nothing. Your brain, From what I understand, does not distinguish between a story heard or read. If you have to drive or clean, audiobooks are great. I would imagine a lot of sj listeners love an old nasty audiobook. Also, literature in translation is excellent To check out on tape because you get a little leg up on pronunciation of proper nouns. Then if you’re trying to talk about characters or you’re listening to someone else talk about them, you’ll know what is what. I’ve noticed that audiobooks are very polarizing in the readerly community; my sister used to be a major hater but I won her over Eventually.

ampgorky

I read novels!

ampgorky

Couldn’t live without jstor

ampgorky

Glad to see a new episode in this series. Went to a lot of raves in the late 90s/early 00s (Gulf Coast scene) and can't wait until that era

Unknown User

ZEE KRAFTWERK

NYCM&AHole


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