After Hours in Siberia

The backyard of the noodle house in Novosibirsk.
The backyard of the infamous noodle house in Novosibirsk. This is where the party was after the music. | Photo: Graw Böckler

International electro artists travelled to Siberia in 2015 where, for the first time, an international offshoot of the famous Berlin CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art took place. Those who were there tell us about Asian noodles, dancing frenzies and lots of vodka. 
 

By Silvia Silko

According to a Siberian proverb “A hundred years is no age and a thousand kilometres is noa distance.” In Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, space and time are subject to the standards of its inhabitants. The last century may indeed have seemed to move rapidly for the city. Originally a small town, it owed its foundation to the Novosibirsk Railway Bridge, which was built in 1893 and made it possible to cross the Ob River for the first time. The bridge is one of the most extensive bridge crossings on the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway and Novosibirsk has long been Russia’s third largest city.

Accordingly, Novosibirsk is the economic and cultural centre of Siberia. People are drawn here in search of jobs. The defence industry and aircraft and mechanical engineering are important economic sectors. Presently, a good 1.6 million people live in Novosibirsk, and growth continues unabated. Despite the expanses surrounding the city, housing is scarce and rents are high. The cityscape is characterised by imposing architecture, the river, which is up to a kilometre wide, and countless unadorned prefabricated buildings.

“Novosibirsk has such a unique atmosphere. Even the drive from the airport is unforgettable: At first there’s nothing for a long time – then suddenly you’re in such an exciting big city. Modernity and tradition are directly juxtaposed: there’ll be a hipster café next to a pile of concrete, next to an old wooden shack,” says musician Helena Hauff. She speaks of the colour palette of the city – browns and greys – and about how it seemed to her as if a filter was lying over the metropolis. This makes everything seem a bit surreal, although one is constantly aware of the city’s rough edges.

In 2015, Helena Hauff came to Novosibirsk for the first and only time on an invitation from the Berlin CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art, which was itself a guest here in Siberia. “This collaboration came about through the Goethe-Institut,” explains Jan Rohlf. He is a co-founder of the CTM Festival in Berlin, which was held for the first time 22 years ago. The CTM (formerly club transmediale) focuses on electronic and contemporary music and art and is deliberately held far from the usual hotspots of Berlin nightlife. The festival has been held in partnership with transmediale since its first edition and is considered one of the world’s largest platforms for digital culture.

“Actually, it’s not our intention to export our model to other regions and impose it on their scenes,” Rohlf explains, “but we think collaboration and networking are important.” He explains how the then director of the Goethe-Institut in Novosibirsk met local people involved in electronic music and art and suggested a collaboration with CTM Berlin. “The Goethe-Institut’s idea was to strengthen the scene in Novosibirsk, to give it visibility, to form a basis for mutual exchange and, in the best case, to offer stimuli for their own similar projects,” Rohlf explains. In close cooperation, a programme was designed that pursued precisely these goals and filled the concept of the CTM with Siberian life. Exciting artists, local and international, met on the stages of unusual or special locations, mainly in Novosibirsk, but also 800 kilometres away in Krasnoyarsk.

“The last show took place in a pretty weird place in Novosibirsk,” Helena Hauff recalls. “I don’t think it was a club at all, it was actually selling fried Asian noodles. But the operators must have had a soft spot for electronic music. Anyway, the walls of the converted noodle kitchen were covered with stickers and painted portraits of DJs who’d never been there, but who were obviously popular,” she says. The state philharmonic hall, the stylish RAGU, a café by day, bar by night, with a glass front above the roofs of the city, the science library and the modern Globus Theater also served as venues for the six-day event. “The city and its cultural-policy people welcomed the CTM. We were given a lot of opportunities, we were allowed to use official venues, and that is an important sign of appreciation for alternative culture,” explains Jan Rohlf.

In Russia, Moscow and St. Petersburg are still considered creative centres, and young talent tends to migrate there. The scene in the region around Novosibirsk does exist, but the individual musicians and artists often see themselves as unnoticed marginal figures, as the British journalist Luke Turner describes in his article about CTM Siberia. He describes a scene that is sometimes too dispersed for a fixed music network, that is aware of itself but whose infrastructure is still in need of development, and a club culture that has few constant points of contact – and is perhaps unfathomable for that very reason.

Turner wonders to what extent the club landscapes in Berlin or London have succumbed to a certain uniformity through gentrification and globalisation, making them interchangeable. Are Siberia and its young artists more honest? Rawer? Possibly. But romanticise with caution: Being a guest is easy. It’s easy to admire the beauty of the unpolished when it’s not part of your everyday life and you don’t have to face the its challenges yourself.

“I think the music created in Siberia is directed more inward. It seemed to me as if it was created mainly without an audience, in people’s bedrooms. Basically, however, I find it difficult to identify a sound that is specific to the region,” Rohlf muses. For Helena Hauff, electronic music needs its audience. In an interview during the coronavirus pandemic when club nights couldn’t take place, she talks about how she prefers being a DJ with a densely populated dance floor to producing music in a studio. She would miss the immediacy and the energy that is triggered by the revellers, she explains. Hauff experiences the audience in Novosibirsk as hungry and excessive above all. “Before my set, Rabih Beaini from Lebanon played. He played experimental stuff, Krautrock and psychedelic music,” she says, “Cool stuff, definitely! But not really music you can move to. But the audience was enthusiastic. I’ve never seen anyone dance to that kind of music before!”

By 2015, Helena Hauff had long been an international DJ celebrity. The 33-year-old started her career at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel Club, where she was resident DJ. From there things quickly went uphill; she was booked for renowned clubs and festivals worldwide. Crack Magazine, for one, called her the most exciting artist of the present day and her music was perceived and celebrated worldwide as a consistent further development of the early Detroit days of techno. It sounds like post-punk and industrial; Helena Hauff’s compositions are unyielding, dark, energetic and raw. In short, her music seems to fit quite well in Siberia. “It was great fun to DJ there because everyone was so open and up for it. Sometimes the audience needs a warm-up phase – not in Novosibirsk. It went off right away, people started dancing immediately and never stopped until the end,” she recalls. Did the Asian noodles afterwards taste good? “Sure! I was hungry and there was vodka – greasy noodles are just the thing,” Hauff says and laughs.

“There was a lot of vodka. It was often served in half-litre carafes,” says Ursula Böckler. When you travel to an unknown country, you always have preconceptions – and sometimes some of them are confirmed, she says. Böckler and Georg Graw form the Berlin artist duo graw böckler. Together they create experimental video works, music videos and photo series. They’ve been part of the CTM Festival orbit since 2006, travelling to Siberia to work on their project “Let’s talk about the weather.” The weather is a topic for small talk, sometimes even with a negative stigma: You talk about the weather when you have nothing else to say to each other, right? “We think instead that it’s an easy way to open up. Anyone can talk about the weather. If you ask about the weather, there’s always an answer,” explains Böckler. Graw adds that you can also talk about your own situation in a very personal way without the answer becoming too politically explosive – something that’s not insignificant in Russia.

In Novosibirsk, the duo roamed the city, talked to people, filmed rain puddles and captured moments of CTM Siberia. “We were very surprised that people there seem to think winter is the best season. They told us that everything is so beautifully bright then,” Böckler recounts. Graw and Böckler found Novosibirsk in 2015 to be a city of turmoil: There was a lot of construction going on, and what was being built was insanely ambitious and big. The city was on the move and seething. This mood was also organically woven into the programme and atmosphere of CTM Siberia. The visitors were mainly younger people who were happy that international musicians were finally coming to their homeland. At the same time, the men and women there knew quite a lot about the international scene – perhaps even more than those who live in a techno capital like Berlin. “Here in Berlin, people tend to revolve around themselves, because sometimes they think that’s enough,” says Jan Rohlf.

CTM Siberia was also meant to be an event of hope: hope that the Siberian scene would now collaborate more, for a starting signal for something new. The hope that it would create its own offshoot after CTM did come true. In 2016 and 2017, two editions of the Frontier Siberia Festival took place – inspired by the CTM. Again, the makers of the event were supported by the Goethe-Institut, again, guests from all over the world were in Novosibirsk and the surrounding area. “Unfortunately, it didn’t go any further after that. Perhaps the scene became too fragmented, but some of the protagonists actually went to Moscow, where the art scene is more established,” says Rohlf. Maybe Siberia needs a little more time for development and growth, maybe stronger alliances between the urban centres of the Siberian region will emerge at some point. Time and distance are, as the proverb says, relative quantities after all.

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