Eduard Artemyev

Recently I came across this nice video from the 1987 Soviet Russia, demonstrating an early version of photoshop ("Олдскульный Фотошоп", as they say...):



Characteristic: the tenor voice of the speaker who with plenty of intonation and jovial enthusiasm sings his text. The device demonstrated is not Russian, but according to this discussion a modified (i.e. translated) version of a French system.

Now, this has been blogged plenty of times, and interesting enough, many viewers noticed that at 2:12 a very famillar piece of music appeared. Younger generation have heard the modern version: "Resurrection" by the Moscowian group PPK. This piece is a classic piece in the dance/trance/clubbing scene - hey, I listened to this stuff 10 years ago.



The piece appearing in the above video is much older than PPKs version: it was scored for the "Siberiade" movie and is composed by Eduard Artemyev in 1979. (I was apparently by far not the only one wondering about this.) Here is the piece in its full length:



The style is very similar to the famous contemporary Greek electro-virtuoso Vangelis. Try to compare Artemyev's piece with Vangelis' "Alpha" from 1976, which is constructed in a very similar way and has a similar soundscape, even if the melodies are quite different.

Artemyev also scored the music to several of Tarkovskys movies, here I would like to emphasize Stalker, which is definitely my personal favorite (there will be a lost more on this in upcoming posts)! The scene below was conceived in the same time period (1979) as the Siberiade, but is in my opinion much more timeless and universal.




I wonder how many eastern European synthesizer artists existed during the cold war era. To date, I only know one.

And... I completed a post about Soviet Russia without adding a single Yakov Smirnoff type joke!