Eduard Artemyev (1937–2022) was a Russian composer, born in Novosibirsk, who became one of the first champions of electronic music in the Soviet Union and the composer of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979). Soon after graduating from the Moscow Conservatory in 1960 he met the engineer Evgeny Murzin, inventor of the ANS, a photoelectronic synthesiser on which sound was drawn by scratching into a coated glass plate.
On Solaris he combined ANS textures with a Bach chorale prelude; on Stalker, working with the Synthi 100, he built a tanpura-like drone, a slowed-down tar and processed train rhythms into a soundtrack where music and sound effects are hard to separate. Over six decades he wrote for more than 150 films, with long collaborations with Nikita Mikhalkov and Andrei Konchalovsky, whose Siberiade (1979) gave him a theme later used at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. He died in Moscow in December 2022.