First of all, Kuryokhin was a brilliant musician for his time and one of the few Russians known in the Western experimental-jazz scene, he played in at least on

First of all, Kuryokhin was a brilliant musician for his time and one of the few Russians known in the Western experimental-jazz scene, he played in at least one concert with John Zorn and Bill Laswell (with Valentina Ponomareva as the frontwoman). There's a great excerpt from a TV show where complaints thrown at his band are so typical and predictable they're laughable (it's in Russian though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJTAhNhaaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJTAhNhaaY But also, his bullshitting skills are unparalleled, you literally never know if he's saying something he believes. There are sort-of “behind the scenes” clips for the absurdist movie ‘Two Captains 2’—where he as an actor, and the director Sergey Debizhev talk to different reporters by making up each their own plot on the spot. There's a 40-minute TV interview where the interviewer admits he doesn't know if a single true thing was said. In the second clip from the OP article you can see how both Kuryokhin and Sholokhov had trouble holding in the laughter while recording their “talk,” and that's just a part of the full video. The thing about late 80s–early 90s Russian media and arts scene is, it was “anything goes,” a period of braindump after the suffocating atmosphere of the USSR. (I barely caught the end of the time of change in the late 90s, and still the influx of modern arts was like enlightenment and nirvana after both stale Soviet standards and the sugary shitshow of the local pop music). In this scene, a lot of talented people just did weirdest things they could with the extremely low budgets, because the old rules were thrown away, and no new ones were made yet. Sex, blood, shit, you name it, we had a lot of that, mostly in abominable taste and quality. There are plenty of bands of varying degree of absurdism from that era: Nogu Svelo, NOM, GrOb, Mango-Mango, the parody of Boney Nem, etc. Pranksters and jesters became important in all forms of media since they were showing people that life could, and probably should, be a lot different. Kuryokhin worked closely with the gang of the Leningrad “rock club,” but I'd say he was sorta ahead of them, being in free jazz and modern-classical music and known in the West (playing on one stage with Zorn in '91, come on). A repetition of that experience is impossible unless we have another go with the Iron Curtain. In the past thirty years, media and show business here have settled a lot just like they did in the West, disregarding even the whole oppression stuff. Now there are things that you can do to get any kind of known, and making an absurdist band is not really one of them. (Though the post-indie antifolk wave from ~five years ago was pretty good.) For my taste, we're in dire need of fresh big time satire that cuts deep and hurts a lot. Bonus track: “a true renaissance of shit” that is more familiar to the Western audience, courtesy of Poorly Drawn Lines: http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/internet/ http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/internet/