NEW COMPOSERS
a group that was formed almost 40 years ago, but has not lost its relevance to this day. The team founded by Valery Alakhov and Igor Verichev is believed to play electronic music, but in fact the style of the group is much deeper – critics define it as “St. Petersburg Pop Art”.
“New Composers”, according to Valery Alakhov, one of the group’s founders, is not so much a musical collective as a conceptual one. The collective found its original technique in combining music and lyrics from the world air around us: radio, television, records. They recorded noises, TV and radio programs, cut magnetic tape into pieces, rearranged them and saw what would happen. They would collect turntables and tape recorders from friends, take them to a place where there was a mixing console, then turn them on and mix them. The result was original musical collages and mysterious compositions that anticipated the emergence of trance, ambient, neo-disco and other musical styles.
The musicians met in Leningrad as schoolchildren, and in the early 1980s they organized discos in the Proftekhobrazovanie Culture Center. In 1983 in the MDT studio they recorded experimental material, which was an original compilation of various musical fragments, technical noises, sounds of nature and space. The material formed the basis of the debut album “Cosmic Space”. Around the same time Alakhov and Verichev became regulars at the Leningrad Rock Club and crossed paths with many of its members, including Sergei Kuryokhin, Kino and Aquarium. They then came upon the creative group New Artists, whose informal leader, Timur Novikov, suggested the name New Composers. In 1987, the New Composers registered the creative association “Club of Science Fiction” and started organizing night techno-discos in the Planetarium, thus laying the foundations of Russian techno-culture. It was they who introduced the cosmic theme of parties, which was later embodied in the famous “Gagarin Party” at VDNKh.