Electronic Springtime

April is proving to be a milestone month for electronic music in Moscow as several European electronic bands converge on the city and an electronic music festival, held once before in 2004, resurfaces for a 2007 edition.

Sweden's Covenant, the Norwegian-U.S. combo Combichrist and the German band Haujobb are set to play Sunday night at Gorod. From Thursday to April 22, the Abracadabra festival will take place at 35MM cinema and the All-Russia Exhibition Center, or VVTs. Finally, Austria's Radian and Germany's Console will take the stage at Aktovy Zal on April 20 and 21, respectively.

These acts represent a newer generation of electronic musicians, mostly in their early- to mid-30s, who started in the 1990s and were inspired by a wide range of '80s artists. The most ambitious undertaking in Russia by any of the bands is a two-week tour of the country by Covenant and Haujobb, who, in addition to their Moscow appearance, will also take in Volgograd, Saratov, Samara, Ufa, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Perm and St. Petersburg.

Originally from Helsingborg, Sweden, Covenant performs an intriguing mix of streamlined synthpop and relentlessly rhythmic electronic body music, or EBM. The band's members are old Russia hands, having played live twice in Moscow and once in St. Petersburg. Covenant's frontman, Eskil Simonsson, and Joakim Montelius, its lyricist and one of its keyboard players, have also DJed in Moscow.

Covenant has a song called "Theremin," named after Leon Theremin, who invented the early electronic instrument that bears his name. Often heard in the soundtracks of 1950s science-fiction and horror movies, the theremin generates a magnetic field and is played with hand gestures, without the player actually touching the instrument.

"There is no Theremin instrument in the song," Montelius said in an e-mail. "But we named it in recognition of Theremin's pioneering work in electronic music. Theremin pursued a career in America but got captured by Soviet agents and brought back home. After making weird instruments for dancers to interact with on stage, the same technology was used to make escape-proof prisons for the KGB. It's a strange twist of fate and I have no idea if it's better to make useless art or support a political struggle, but it certainly makes me think about the consequences of technological achievements and their possible uses."

Also playing at Gorod on Sunday are Haujobb, which plays a mix of genres including industrial and EBM, and Combichrist, a bombastic industrial act in the KMFDM vein, complete with attitude and flour-and-blood make-up.

Powerline Agency Germany's Console will play at Aktovy Zal on April 21.

For acts of a more experimental nature, the Abracadabra festival could be just the ticket. Dmitry Garin and his former co-workers at an entertainment company organized the first festival in 2004 as a kind of glorified party for themselves. After quitting the company last year, Garin devoted his full-time efforts to the festival, inviting a U.S. electronic composer from the first festival, Keith Fullerton Whitman, to help curate it.

Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, Whitman goes by the stage name of Hrvatski, even though he has no Slavic background. His role as curator seems appropriate, as he is a walking encyclopedia of electronic music.

"Russia has a long, sordid history of electronic music," he said in an e-mail. "It dates back to Theremin, but also the group of composers working with the ANS synthesizer from the late 1950s on: Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, and, of course, Eduard Artemyev. It seems that electronic music plays a much larger role in the youth culture of Russia than it does elsewhere."

Detractors of electronic music often accuse it of being cold, mechanical and monotonous, and the musicians interviewed for this article had various ways of addressing this criticism.

"My performances are entirely improvised," Whitman said. "I use no [pre-recorded] material -- just a loose collection of sound bites. Everything else is synthesized in real time. Electronic performances have been getting easier to do, but ultimately [some of] these are merely extended DJ sets. I try to stay away from these sorts of performance conceits as much as possible."

Radian and Console bring warmth and urgency to their music by melding sounds from electronic sources with those of acoustic instruments.

Martin Gretschmann of Console said in an e-mail: "The combination of instruments like guitar and bass with laptop has always been important for Console. The music is definitely more urgent and 'real' when we play live. Almost everything is energetic and 'danceable.' So you better wear your dancing shoes."

Radian's Martin Brandlmayr said that for him there is no division between electronically generated music and acoustic sounds.

"It's just a different source," he said in an e-mail. "I was always fascinated by the possibilities of processing acoustic sounds through electronic instruments. I have always wanted to bring the liveliness of manually created music and the precision of electronic music together."

Covenant, Combichrist and Haujobb play Sun. starting at 6 p.m. at Gorod, located at 20/13 Staraya Basmannaya Ulitsa. Metro Krasniye Vorota, Kurskaya. Tel. 729-3628, 261-6174. For details about the Abracadabra festival, see www.abracadabra.ru, and for details about Radian and Console, see www.aktzal.ru.