New project presents rare disco and funk from the 80s of Soviet Central Asia

The former USSR may not be known as a musical hotbed, but a new compilation of rare Soviet music offers a glimpse into the vibrant, dance-oriented scene that existed there in the 1980s.

Synthesizing the Silk Road: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uyghur Rock, and Crimean Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asiacontains 15 songs from the 80s in the region. The project was created after vinyl remains were discovered in a Soviet-era vinyl factory in the Uzbekistan capital Tashkent.

This rarely heard music – with lots of funk and Moroder-esque disco – is released digitally this week and will be available in physical form from September 24 via Ostinato Records.

The music on the compilation came to life as a function of world events. In 1941, Stalin ordered a mass evacuation when the Nazis invaded the USSR, with 16 million people taking trains to Central Asia. Many of them landed in Tashkent, with this group including the engineers who would establish the Gramplastinok factory in Tashkent four years later.

The 15-track compilation is made mostly from vinyl discovered at this factory. Bands from all over Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, the Crimean Peninsula and beyond) traveled to Tashkent to record music.

By the mid-1970s, the Soviet disco scene was in full swing, with Latvian DJ Hardijs Lediņš penning a widely read manifesto in which, according to the album’s sleeve notes, he urged “more professionalism among musicians, because ‘just like mushrooms after the rain, just like the rain after a hot day, discos are springing up like mushrooms these days.’ Lediņš was expressing the sentiments of many young people who felt that these clubs should play more than music imported from the West, where disco had emerged after its origins in the clubs of New York City.

“The authorities, recognizing the futility of banning discos altogether,” the liner notes read, “opened dance halls exclusively through Komsomols (state youth leagues) and required partygoers to attend an hour-long lecture on the Soviet worldview before the music began.”

The US-born genre became so popular in the USSR that in 1976, the Latvian capital of Riga hosted the first week-long USSR-wide disco festival, with artists traveling from across the region. “Nearly 200 disco clubs were soon registered with the local Komsomol in Moscow and 300 in Riga,” the liner notes continue, “and eventually, according to data collected during our research, about 20,000 public discos were visited by 30 million people per year in all 15 republics of the union.

With discos raking in the money, “dance nights allowed the black market trade to fester. ‘Western clothing and other hard-to-get items – vinyl, jeans, foreign cigarettes – were literally sold under the table. Discos had become a space for early alternative culture, as well as for private trade.'”

Meanwhile, there is a so-called ““disco mafia” emerged in many Soviet cities, including Tashkent, with these entities controlling “a lucrative business model with multiple revenue streams.” Propaganda and ideology officials began accepting bribes to turn away from clubs that indulged in “bourgeois” extravagance or music that was considered ideologically hostile.

“But the impact of this music went beyond mere entertainment or cultural showcases,” the notes conclude. “From the opening of these clubs in the 1960s, the political ranks were formed by what historian Sergei Zhuk calls ‘The Deep Purple Generation.’ Disco and rock in the Soviet Union played a significant role in the dismantling of the USSR, steering youth leagues and, in turn, future leadership toward attitudes far removed from the Soviet gospel.”

The Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, with Synthesizing the Silk Roads to offer a relic from this perhaps unlikely moment in music history.