The recently renovated memorial sites of the Soviet space program, such as museums and monuments, also increasingly recall the sites of “patriotic education” erected around the memory of the Great Patriotic War. Sometimes, the War and Space appear together: such was the last parliamentary election booster campaign, conventionally titled “The Land of the Winners”, in which the heroes of the Great Patriotic War were accompanied by cosmonauts and space program engineers such as Gagarin and Korolev. Through the post-Soviet decades, the latter has become an inexhaustible resource for extracting profit, for legitimation of the Russian political regime, and recently also for the market of political repression, with photos taken in wrong places at wrong times and posted later in social media functioning as motives for criminal prosecution. To a large extent, the appropriation of Soviet space legacies seems to coincide with the appropriation of the commodified memory of the Great Patriotic War. The legacies of the Soviet space program, of Sputnik, of Gagarin’s flight and of the first spacewalk are turned into a set of easily recognizable symbols that are put on pullovers for sale as much as they appear on election posters. Is this short episode another case of capitalization on nostalgia? In modern Russia, space culture and space politics are commonly seen through the lens of nostalgia and commodification of memory that allows both economic and political capitalization. These are commonly expressed in opposition to the state-sponsored mainstream movies that give their audience a bitter taste of lost future, with comments such as “at least someone can still make a great movie”. The comments to the video are thoroughly positive: this short piece simultaneously raises feelings of belonging and of wonder at a seemingly impossible assemblage of Russian realities, Soviet fantasies, and futuristic projections. The episode is thoroughly nostalgic: it offers popular songs with a guitar accompaniment, tea-drinking from Soviet-style glasses, and a train station on another planet that is simply taken from any Russian provincial town. In a peculiar mix of Russian and English words, she describes the happenings onboard her carriage, taking place against a view of the galaxy opening up through the windows. In the 8-minutes episode, a train conductor working on board a spaceship composed of Russian train carriages and operating on the line to Neptune makes a home assignment for her English class. Manufacture and worldwide distribution by Above Board, 2020.Why has the Day of Cosmonautics, April 12, never become a national holiday in Russia?Ī popular video, Russian Space train, made by a comedian group Birchpunk, gathered more than 4 million views on YouTube. Mastering courtesy of Keith Tenniswood Curved. Selected and sequenced by Vladimir Ivkovic and Ivan Smagghe. 'IDMEMO' is a collaborative project between Above Board Projects, Offen Music and Les Disques De La Mort. There are some classics (Black Dog’s lysergic 'Psyl-Cosyin'), there are some rarities (that Zugzwang track), some tested late night floor melters (Reload remixing Slowdive) and some personal outlandish choices that strangely take their place (Spiritualized’s 'Anyway That You want Me-remix 3').Īll in all, This is an anti-archive, a choice of tracks primarily lead by emotion, more pads than glitches,”intelligent” music depraved by that last half-pill at 6am rather than high-brow destructurations, Ivkovic & Smagghe hitting, as ever, at their own margins. The compilation unfolds in the loosest, the best way to make some kind of sense. One can not stress enough the importance of this crossing of roads, pop kids getting through to the dancefloor via Aphex Twin and nerdy house heads dissolving their four to the floor into the futuristic world of Warp compilations. It is a very personal snapshot of a moment in time, when both of them were working in record shops, when they were listening to indie and electronic music. It was not Vladimir Ivkovic & Ivan Smagghe’s point when they decided on the project. 'IDMEMO' would not pretend to be a representative compendium of 90’s-00’s Intelligent Dance Music.
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