The Soundsmiths

Yevgeny Bikov loves being a DJ, but Russia is having a hard time loving him. According to the university student who has been spinning tunes at an unnamed House of Culture in the town of Nikrassov for the past two years, club culture has not developed as well in Russia as in other countries.


"The public isn't ready. Young people haven't opened up yet," 19-year-old Bikov said. "I don't know why. Maybe they are not progressive enough. And there are so few clubs with good equipment in Moscow - and so few good DJs," he said.


But Marina Polteva, a professional singer and theater producer who is famous in Russia and abroad, is coming to the rescue. She and top Moscow DJ Slava-Finest (a.k.a. Vyacheslav Bibi), who has DJed at a number of Moscow clubs and is the current art director at Moscow club Studio, have founded Russia's first school for DJs, at which Bikov is a student.


The school trains two types of DJs - radio and club. Radio DJs work in a studio, playing and talking about music. Club DJs work in nightclubs, spinning and even composing electronic music using computers, record players and a great deal of other audio equipment.


On Sept. 6, the DJ Studio opened its doors at central Moscow's Gnessin Academy of Music. Ever since, the corridors of the prestigious classical music school - which was founded in 1890, nearly a century before the words "techno" or "jungle" were ever used as descriptive terms for music - have been resounding with the sounds of base riffs and voice samples.


"This school was badly needed," said Polteva, who consulted with representatives from London's Ministry of Sound before opening the studio. "Our young people love this music - it's their life. And it's so important that they know where all these types of music came from and how they developed in Russia," Polteva said.


DJ Studio students, whose ages range from 14 to 35, take a two-month course that consists of 64 hours of classes in basic acoustics and DJing techniques. Other disciplines, such as choreography and musician studies, focus more heavily on program composition. A course in television studies and a master of communications degree will be available at the beginning of next year.


With no funds but the students' fees ($400 per course) to support the school, Polteva, using audio equipment financed by Slava-Finest, has laid the foundation here for what she hopes will develop into a full-fledged youth center called Zvuk, or Sound. She has taken the first steps to compensate for the lack of available literature by writing what she calls the "laws" of DJing, which include everything from how to adapt volume to the size of the room to eye-contact protocol. The first formal textbook, Yevgeni Avchenko's "History of House Music in Russia," is due for release in February. Slava-Finest, who has been an unofficial teacher of mixing techniques at the radio station 106.8 FM since 1996, also contributed to the effort by writing a book - "DJ" - about DJing techniques.


In order to better accomplish her goal of "officially professionalizing the DJ's job," Polteva has created a curriculum that includes more than just a few mixing techniques. The students, many of whom are also students at conventional universities, study the history of jazz and contemporary music, speech and communication, stage psychology, performing arts and radio journalism and take special lessons in image and leadership.


"I've gathered people who are fanatics," she said of the school's 15 teachers, one of whom is a professor of music theory at Harvard University who commutes between Moscow and Massachusetts.


"I want to teach the students the secrets of the profession," she said. "The things you don't learn on the job - how to adapt your voice and language to your audience and how to create your stage persona. A female club DJ, for example, should behave in a feminine way - even if she is a transvestite."


The discipline's unorthodox affiliations aside, 15-year-old Studio student Maria Pisklova (cover photo) takes her studies seriously. Pisklova, who has just completed the club-DJ course, has set her sights on a career as a sound engineer. "In order to be a good club DJ, you shouldn't just know music. You must be able to understand the music on a deeper, more spiritual level. You have to feel its mood, what the author wants to transmit."


Club culture in Russia first surfaced in the early '90s, with the opening of the first youth-oriented techno club, Master, followed in 1992 by clubs Horizon and Jump.


Although DJs similar to present-day DJs have existed in the capital since 1987, the real club-culture movement didn't really take off until 1994, when DJs Fonar and Ivan Salmakov, who has since disappeared under mysterious circumstances, began organizing their legendary raves - large parties in factories or warehouses with hundreds or thousands of guests, club DJs spinning electronic music (Russian DJs call it underground) and, often, an abundance of drugs like heroin or ecstasy.


Back then, today's DJs went by the unabbreviated title disc jockey, and worked with cassette tapes, reels and film. "Now, they use only vinyl records and CDs," Slava-Finest said.


Those early pioneers, Pisklova reckons, faced difficulty because what they were doing was entirely without precedent in the Soviet Union. "Our parents knew a much more limited music scene. Nobody understood those DJs," she said.


But today's scene, too, has its troubles. Bikov regrets what he calls the "lack of competition" among DJs, and the fact that there is very little non-Western electronic music available. Depending on the venue and on his or her skills, a Moscow DJ can earn between $200 and $1,000 per month, Slava-Finest said, although recent graduates are likely to earn less.


The first alumni graduated last Friday to the sounds of popping champagne corks and, of course, music. Each of the 15 students had passed an exam in a real-life setting (a radio studio for the radio DJ students, the club Titanic for the club DJ students).


So what future awaits the school's inaugural class?


One celebrant, radio course graduate Yulia Gleba, said she is ready to abandon her more conventional university studies to work as a DJ, if such an opportunity arises. Another, radio course graduate Fyodor Strizhiovsky, a 17-year-old Chinese studies student at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, has slightly more outlandish plans. "I'm open to anything. Maybe I'll end up playing parties at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs!"