Aleksei Borisionok (DJ Vova Siniy)

This Song is Against Everything

In 2017 before his unexpected death, cultural theorist Mark Fisher left the unfinished manuscript of the book titled Acid Communism. It introduces reassessment of the Western counter-culture, its forgotten experiments in collective joy, refusal to work and communal living. It provides criticism of neoliberal destruction of bright experiments in Democratic Socialism and Libertarian Communism. Reevaluating practices of consciousness-raising groups and seeking for post-capitalist desires, acid communism suggests us to go back into history.



Few years before state socialism collapsed in the Soviet Union, the band Братья по разуму – Brothers in Mind – performed in the hotel Orlenok in Moscow in 1989. They played before Sonic Youth, and their participation was not announced. Coming from the closed scientific city of Snezhinsk in Siberia, they were one of the pioneers of sampling and mixing various samples from punk, pop and electronic music, discovering political and psychedelic territories of late socialist music culture. They performed a track titled Acid Communism. Was it the same acid? Was it the same communism?



Deriving from the track ‘Azid Communizm’ by Soviet band Brothers in Mind and Eastern European (post)punk, electronic and pop music, Aleksei Borisionok (DJ Vova Siniy) rethinks post-socialist temporalities and the idea of political prefiguration in the context of political uprising in Belarus in 2020-22 via the selection of songs, field recordings and readings of his texts on this subject matter.

Performer: Aleksei Borisionok