HSE Art and Design School Opens Experimental Music Library

The HSE Art and Design School has opened a unique audio library. Initiated by Evgeny Voronovsky, composer, independent sound producer and lecturer at the Art and Design School, the library holds rare samples of experimental sound art, noise music, and underground music. HSE News Service spoke with Evgeny about why visiting the audio library is a must for students and teachers of all fields of study.

Currently, the library includes 120 indexed editions. Visitors can look at and listen to albums by Rapoon, Government Alpha, Pacific 231, Arctau Eos, and Maurizio Bianchi. The collection also features print media, such as the Viva Italia encyclopedia – a monumental work by Dmitry Vasilyev, who collected articles about artists and labels that have developed in Italy over the last 60 years.

The library will soon acquire a vinyl collection as well as materials of other genres and media. In the selection of new acquisitions, priority will be placed on releases in their original design with unconventional packaging. The collection aims to demonstrate the variety of musical identities in experimental music and provide access for students and teachers to rare samples of print media, packaging, and design.

Industrial and post-industrial music brings together information and performance. Therefore, musicians of the genre often take unconventional approaches to album design and presentation. Album covers and inserts are not only functional, but serve to evoke a specific atmosphere for  the listener, and convey issues and themes that are important for the musician. The musicians experiment with materials, colours, drawings, and text in order to make the presentational style of their albums unique.

According to Evgeny Voronovsky, whose students regularly create and release their own experimental music collections, the audio library at the HSE Art and Design School is aimed at promoting the culture of visual and tactile accompaniment to music. It is important for students of the programme of Sound Art and Sound Design to work with rare editions not only in order to expand their musical experiences, but to better understand the broader context of music production, he says. Moreover, students of other programmes can come here for inspiration for their design projects as well.

The collection donated by Evgeny for the audio library previously belonged to music journalist and Monochrome Vision label owner Dmitry Vasilyev. Vasilyev promoted electronic, experimental, noise and ambient music, and had been collecting samples for many years. After he passed away, his family entrusted Evgeny Voronovsky with the collection. Evgeny believes that the HSE Art and Design School—the home of Russia’s first undergraduate programme in Sound Art and Sound Design, which accepted its first class this year, and a new master’s programme in  Sound Art & Sound Studies, which will be launched next year—is the best home for the record library.

A catalogue of the library collection will be available soon.

You can visit the audio library in Room 369 of the HSE Art and Design School, which is located on 12 Malaya Pionerskaya Ulitsa. Currently, albums and titles of the collection are available to professors and teaching assistants of the School for classroom use at any time. In the near future, the collection will be available to students as well. Items will be available for check out just like books in a library.

The HSE Art and Design School Audio Library is grateful to Zinaida Vasilyeva, Timur Omar, Dmitry Gomzyakov, and Kirill Starikov for their assistance and the materials they provided.