Teorija Struna
November 5, Dim
🎫 in bio
Zhenya Gorbunov is someone who knows how to turn the avant-garde into a circus show. Juggling meanings, genres and pop culture references, he strikes an unusual balance between absurdity and seriousness, musical experimentation and outright theatrical chaos. Gorbunov celebrates the absurdities of everyday life, weaving allusions to Soviet pop music into his sharp-edged avant-rock. His semantic playfulness and tendency to take metaphors literally are infectious — even when the songs themselves are deliberately straightforward.
There’s also plenty of 1980s in his work, though not the glossy, neon-lit kind. Think of the era when Soviet television aired the “Vzglyad” programme, music by Zvuki Mu, and awkwardly naive, angular commercials. The imagery of the Perestroika years — bold and free-spirited, absurd and avant-garde, simply unaware that things could be any other way — is, in fact, perfectly in tune with Zhenya’s approach.
Inturist exists somewhere in between: too popular to be avant-garde, yet too avant-garde for the pop scene. And in that sense, he makes a perfect match for Mike Cooper.