"Music Embodied in Life"

Rock Music, Materiality and "Life- creation" in 1970s Leningrad

Abstract

The community that formed around rock music in late 1960s and 1970s Leningrad was conscious of existing in conditions of material scarcity and being cut off from the flow of rock music from its dominant centres. Locally, music-making focused on live concerts known as ‘sessions’, ephemeral and rarely captured in recordings. Simultaneously, the rock community was animated by an innovative interest in the material. Musicians, collectors, artists and organisers made huge efforts to acquire objects associated with the music, prizing highly those, like vinyl LPs, that had physically travelled from the West, but also creating their own stuff using the material resources of their environment. Sounds were thus trans- formed into tangible and durable forms. Drawing on contemporary accounts and memoirs, this article how rock music was imagined materially when listening to shortwave radio, collecting, creating displays at home, and putting the body on show. It argues that via these behaviours life itself became an object of artistic creation, and that doing rock in this way was an important and overlooked part of Leningrad’s rock music culture during this era.