On of the strangest and most beguiling moments in Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” comes not in space, where most of the 1972 film takes place, but on land. About a quarter of the way into the film, there is a simple scene of a car driving down a highway. The unbroken shot, which extends for several minutes, begins to take on other dimensions, opening room for contemplation. The car crisscrossing the labyrinthian highways starts to seem otherworldly. Yet one of the most intriguing things about this moment in the film is the music, and how it completely changes the way we view the scene. What at first resembles the light noise of traffic slowly transforms and emerges as a synthesized roar, turning this boring, automotive tableau into a journey into the unknown.
The sounds you hear throughout “Solaris,” along with many other films by Tarkovsky, were created by Eduard Artemiev, an early pioneer of electronic music. The film’s soundtrack, which is based around interpretations of J.S.Bach’s Chorale Prelude in F minor, and features proto-ambient soundscapes and synthesizer experiments, was released Monday in the United States for the first time, via the label Superior Viaduct.
The history of electronic music is largely undocumented in any concise way. While groups such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in England, along with Louis and Bebe Barron (composers of the soundtrack to 1956’s “Forbidden Planet”), are rightly praised for their contributions to the now dominant form of music creation, there have been numerous other innovators from around the world who have made an impact over the last half-century.
Artemiev, in his work with Tarkovsky, used a rare synthesizer called the ANS, which has its own strange story. According to the writer Max Cole, who wrote what appears to be the most comprehensive history of the ANS in the English language, the synthesizer took 20 years to build and only two were ever constructed. It was a passion project for an inventor named Evgeny Murzin, who risked arrest for his electronic inventions (at the time, you could not purchase electronic components in the USSR), and named his machine after Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, a controversial musical figure around the dawn of the 20th century who developed atonal music systems based on what appears to be occult beliefs.
The ANS is also unusual in its construction. According to Cole, “the machine has 720 sine waves printed over five glass discs,” where “modulated light from these discs is then projected onto the back of the synthesizer’s interface.” Many experimental musicians behind the Iron Curtain traveled to Moscow to test out the machine, and the myth behind the ANS has grown over the years. Artemiev’s experimentations were never commercially available, and it was only in recent years that Tarkovsky’s many films were readily accessible to the public.
The soundtrack to “Solaris” is atypical of the period in which it was produced. At a time when John Barry’s jaunty scores for the James Bond films, along with the operatic bombast of Elmer Bernstein’s work, were all the rage, Artemiev’s sounds are almost anti-music. They are more about tone and environment than accenting a scene — unfamiliar noises boil to the surface and echoed sounds rumble in the distance. At one moment, the sound compliments an image; in the next frame, it appears to be in direct conflict with what’s on the screen. The relationship between sound and image creates a ghostly resonance that adds to much of the film’s mystery.
The last surviving ANS synthesizer is currently housed in the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, and through the work of historians, we are slowly learning about the history of the machine, and finally have access to the sounds it produced. Electronic music currently permeates modern music, from the sounds of hip-hop and EDM to most contemporary film soundtracks. But still, we know little about where these sounds came from. With Eduard Artemiev’s soundtrack to “Solaris,” a little of the mystery has been revealed.
