ivan starzev
yekaterinburg / moscow
He sang of love, to love subjected, / his song was limpid in its tune / as infant sleep, or the unaffected / thoughts of a girl, or as the moon
Он пел любовь, любви послушный, / И песнь его была ясна, / Как мысли девы простодушной, / Как сон младенца, как луна
Alexander Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin” (1833)
The earliest years in Ivan Starzev’s career are tied to the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. Here he established a trademark combination of indie-pop and electronica with his wittily-named Mars Needs Lovers. He simultaneously Dj-ed across the region and the influence of dance music, especially post- or Italo-disco and house, would only grow. Together they transform his ironic pop songs into dance-floor euphoria, pure and simple.
His primary occupation nowadays in the (deliberately misspelled) Soviett Records, which merges most strands of Starzev’s early years in unique and charming ways. It describes itself in only the briefest terms: “A label based in Russia that releases the sonic vibrations of artists and musicians out into space…”
What’s vital here––and entirely passed over in that sentence––is that Soviett does a beautiful job of reimagining the electronic dance/pop aesthetic of the late 1980s. Even the label’s SoundCloud account uses a famous Russian movie still from 1987 as its banner. The movie told of a hopeless romantic who felt woefully out of place as the USSR became nothing much at all under Gorbachev.
Both then and now, the endless optimism and naive romance of a dance floor can be very powerful indeed. In fact, the less attention it pays to the outside world, the more valuable it becomes.