Leningrad
Shnurov’s reply to most questions about his political leanings is “Ask Khodorkovsky”–meaning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oil tycoon awaiting trial on charges of fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement. Many Russians believe Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment was, at least to some extent, a product of his anti-Putin activism. Watching Putin on TV, Shnurov says, is the equivalent of watching a disappointing porn movie. “The scene starts and the people meet,” he says, “but then with Putin, the action is always in the shadows.”
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In 1999 Leningrad’s first album, Pulya (“Bullet”), combined simplistic rock melodies with Shnurov’s noisy, overpowering vocals. But on Mat, released the following year, Shnurov began to cement the group’s identity. The title refers to the linguistic system in Russian by which obscenities are created, a layered process that produces endless combinations of curses; the results are harsher than mere swearing. Mat was rarely spoken and never published in the Soviet era, and the few authors who chose to use it, like the controversial dissident author Eduard Limonov, could publish their works only outside the country.
True enough, references to Ennio Morricone and Django Reinhardt pop up in Leningrad songs; the song “007” on the band’s 2000 album Dachniki riffs on the James Bond theme. But daily drinking hasn’t hurt Shnurov’s productivity. In addition to Babarobot–an absurd Zappa-esque musical set in a Soviet-style factory–he’s composed music for several movie sound tracks, and, in what he calls a “quest to find the new underground,” he’s formed Diode, an electropop band. (Shnurov may have some odd ideas about electropop, though; one of his bandmates told me that Diode’s heavily influenced by Rush.)
When: Fri 11/12, 9 PM
