The second season of Station Radio is built around the Garage Digital program and the World Gone By Computer Class. This season’s curator is the art theorist and researcher into contemporary music and audio culture Evgeny Bylina.

The second season of Station Radio explores the issues of the «world gone by,» a metaphor that can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, February 24, 2022 was the point at which it became apparent not only that the changes were irreversible but also that we had not paid sufficient attention to the events of recent years that led to them. There was a radical shift in the usual coordinates of private and social life, politics and culture, artistic practice and institutional activity. The previous (as far as it was possible to define them) trajectories of the future turned out to be untenable. Secondly, paradoxically, reflecting on these changes requires a focused look at the past in order, as a minimum, to describe the conditions in which we have found ourselves.

This project researches the mechanisms of memory, its mutations and various «politics:» the means of working with memories that are at the intersection of the individual and the collective, official and unofficial history. Such optics suggest that the question is not simply what we remember but also what was left on the sidelines, squeezed out, repressed, and forgotten. It is forgetting (and overcoming forgetting) that is the contradiction we need to resolve in an age of existential crisis.

This nostalgic imperative does not imply naive lamentations about an era that is gone forever. With her strange term «the future of nostalgia,» cultural theorist Svetlana Boym suggested two contradictory modes of interaction with the past. If restorative nostalgia reverts to sources and threatens to re-establish a past, «ideal» world through reactionary effort, then reflective nostalgia looks at the past through the patina of time, from afar, admitting the impossibility of returning home. So, observing ruins becomes a condition of feeling our own historicity, an expression of empathy and judgment, a means of critiquing the present.

«Ruin» and «destruction» are perhaps the object and method that best unite the artistic works of this season. All of the musicians and sound artists who took part in this project work, in one way or another, with unstable archives, their destruction and reassembly: random diary entries, forgotten analogue formats, system audio files, non-music, and even their own voice. Bravery is required to be able to oppose images of ruins. Regardless of aesthetic strategy, each composition offers an uncompromising dissection of the source material and its recontextualization. The result is a troubled and dark portrait of reality at a critical moment.

The philosophy of sound has often proven that the audial can tell us that which lies outside the boundaries of meaning or precedes it. There is a reason why literature after World War II was obliged to completely reconfigure its own means of expression in order to mark its muteness and inability to deal with catastrophic events. Where direct witnessing is impossible, where language misfires and any representation is insufficient, where an ominous lacuna appears in place of the image, it is sound and music that can allow us to express and reflect on our experience. Each audio work is accompanied by a short comment which attempts to reveal and connect the subjects mentioned above.

The project does not pretend to be all-encompassing or to make a statement. The biographies of the authors and addressees are in some way connected with the Russian context and their works should be perceived as an attempt to find a language for discussing what is happening, an attempt to conceptualize the past and present in order to invent another future.

About the Curator

Evgeny Bylina is an art theorist, researcher into contemporary music and audio culture, and musician. He is the curator of and a lecturer on the Master’s program Sound Art & Sound Studies in the School of Design at the Higher School of Economics. He is the editor of the series History of Sound from the publisher New Literary Review (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie). He is curator of the concert series Music for the End of the World (Moscow) and the author of articles in periodicals and academic journals.

Photo: Zhanna Tatarova