Singing Soviet Songs
At the very core of Dani Chё’s creative engine is the unrelenting obsession with Soviet songs. Over 20 years of research, Dani assembled an annotated corpus of approximately 40,000 songs and perfected an arsenal of authentically Soviet vocal and instrumental techniques to perform them in a way that feels present and sincere.
Singing obscure Soviet songs (often on his bayan accordion) on video platforms, in public spaces and anywhere he is allowed to do so, has become an important and deeply personal performance practice that explores deep repressed emotional and ideological baggage of immigrants from former socialist countries.
Gramonist Youtube Channel
One of the early precursor to other projects this channel now contains 100+ unique Soviet songs, with distinct ideological features that demonstrate how truly obscure Soviet ideology was in its various forms over the decades. These features are often forgotten by modern Russian-language listeners, who are more used to a filtered set of Soviet songs that have been adopted by Russia’s current regime for contemporary propaganda purposes.
Soviet Song Shore
Marathon performance at 2016 Jeglag Festival, where Dani Chё sang soviet songs for 24 hours.