(Shukai)With household objects, an electric violin and a tape recorder, the composer and her collaborators made this magnetically playful DIY music
Valentina Goncharova’s luminous output offers a window into a lesser-known Soviet history of experimental music, drawing from classical, jazz, and new age electronic sounds behind the iron curtain. Born in 1953 in Kyiv,
Ukraine, Goncharova moved to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) at age 16, studying classical violin and contemporary composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, but experienced a revelation at a free jazz concert by the Ganelin Trio in the 1970s. Now set on a path towards the homemade and avant garde, she became involved in the underground rock scene and later married an engineer named Igor Zubkov who built her a modified electric violin. They moved to Tallinn, Estonia, bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and began making DIY electroacoustic music, recording household objects with contact mics, and according to one source, building a drum kit from pencils.
The first volume of Goncharova’s enveloping
music came out in 2020 on Estonian label Shukai; the second brings together duets with late Finnish experimental musician Pekka Airaksinen, theatre director and instrumentalist Alexander Aksenov and
Russian composer Sergey Letov. The focus is on the remarkable music they made together, self-recorded in jams at home, in jazz cafes, apartments and studios in Tallinn, Riga, Helsinki and
Moscow between 1987 and 1991.