Russia

After posting the vintage footage of Kraftwerk performing Das Modell, Keep Werking’s John Shilcock sent me a link to this equally interesting historic performance in Russia of The Robots.

via rmfigue:

Originally Broadcasted by USSR TV at 1980

This video captures Defaudio’s first power on of the rare Soviet Synth Alisa 1387 MIDI version.

via DeftAudio:

Synth track has only long hall and compression. There are no EQs, warmers, impulse modeling and so on.It has been real-time operated with already prepared midi sequence.Made by Deftaudio.ru

The Formanta Polivoks is a duophonic, analog synthesizer that was manufactured and marketed in the Soviet Union between 1982 and 1990.

The Polivoks was engineered by circuit designer Vladimir Kuzmin with the appearance of the instrument influenced by his wife Olimpiada, who took inspiration from the design of Soviet military radios. Its retail price upon release was 920 rubles and over its lifetime around 100,000 Polivoks were manufactured – sometimes with a production rate of up to 1,000 units a month.

According to Kuzmin:

We simply wanted the musicians to have the same colors of sound that all American and japan synths have. But at that time I didn’t know that for example the ordinary sawtooth signal can sound so different on the different analog synths and this depends on electronic circuits and components and their combinations. And of coarse I wanted the VCF to sound so sweety as on Minimoog. It seemed to me that VCF was the most complex module among all others. So I’ve spent hardly a year to develop the schematics of filter that was very different from others.

The Polivoks has some features that are either unusual or uncommon on most analog mono synthesizers including a filter that can be switched from low pass to bandpass and two envelopes that can be looped over the AD sections.

If you’ve used the Polivoks synthesizer, leave a comment with your thoughts! Read more…

This is some Russian coverage of the ANS Synthesizer – a photoelectronic musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1937 to 1957.

The basis of his invention was a method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography (developed in Russia concurrently with America), which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal – synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave. Read more…

Synth music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre has been awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Jarre was decorated for “his outstanding contribution to the promotion of music as a culture and his commitment to protecting the environment.”

The official ceremony took place in an amphitheater at the Moscow Faculty of Sciences. The Rector bestowed the honor and the uniform upon Jean Michel Jarre before students and members of the Russian press and TV. A short tribute concert was then played by the university orchestra and choir.

The distinction was granted to Jean Michel Jarre during his stay in Russia, where he is to perform two concerts at the Kremlin Palace, and another one in St. Petersburg.