Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov

Biography

Lebedev-Frontov preferred to release his records on vinyl. For a man whose main material was noise, the choice is telling: the physical object mattered to him.

He was born on 26 August 1960 in Leningrad. According to his biographers, his father was a prominent Soviet military doctor and his grandfather served in the state security organs. He turned to experimental music as early as the 1970s, long before the word “industrial” existed in Russia. I have not seen any documents from that period, so his first experiments can only be judged from his own accounts in interviews. The first project whose history can be traced is Mass Line (Linija Mass). It began in 1987 as an underground venture, and in 1997 Lebedev-Frontov revived it as a studio project; records followed from 1998: “Fanatisch Eiskalt Maschine” (1998), “Genus Ferrum” (2000), “Eiserne Revolution” (2001), “Pas D’Acier” (2002), “Triumph Stali” (2004). In 2007 a whole series appeared: “1987”, “Trud”, “Mechano-Faktura”, “Proletkult”, “Kinematika Mechanizmov”. Other groups emerged in parallel. In 1996, together with Nikolai Sudnik, he created Vetrophonia: it has about a dozen releases, from “Kuomintang” (1998) to “Generalissimus Chiang Kai-shek” (2008), and one more album, “Dadacacophonia Dao”, came out in 2020. Veprisuicida released records from 1996, from the first self-titled album to “Brainwashing” (2020); among them are “Chinese Meat” (2000) and “Vaginacentrism” (2003). There was also Stalnoy Pakt, which recorded albums from 2002 to 2007, including “Okkupacija” and “O Roma O Morte!”. Among other projects in which he took part were Pila, T.A.U. and Dead Hippies. In 1995 he founded his own label, Ultra, which issued experimental noise music, and he was one of the founders of the Gallery of Experimental Sound in Saint Petersburg; by some accounts it opened in 1999, though the exact date is unknown.

The main genres of his visual work were graphic art and collage. In the 1990s he worked with the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov, a radical political party, and with its newspaper Limonka from the time it was founded, and for several years he was in effect the party’s chief artist. By some accounts, he joined the party in 1994. In 1995, together with his friend the musician Sergei Kuryokhin, he took part in the National Bolsheviks’ “Petersburg invasion” during the campaign of Aleksandr Dugin, who was standing for the State Duma in one of the city’s districts. In interviews of recent years he is presented above all as a pioneer of Russian industrial music and as the designer of Limonka.

He said in a 2013 interview that noise puts a person into a state of temporary death. It seems to me a fairly accurate description of what he wanted from the listener: a halt, not entertainment. In 2017 he published the text “Statements on Sound-Pinching” (“Vyskazyvaniya o zvukosklesh­chivaniyakh”), in which he set out his views on noise as a material.

Lebedev-Frontov died on 8 January 2022 in Saint Petersburg. His ashes are buried in the cemetery at the Saint Petersburg crematorium.