I found this mix I picked up by Vladmir Ivkovic which focuses on adventurous sounds from Yugoslavia really interesting. Didn’t recognise a thing. Lots of quite new wave/post punk sounds, alongside some quite psychedelic fare.
I’m guessing the then Yugoslavia was a lot more culturally open than many other communist countries of the time. I’m curious about similarly adventurous sounds from the other side of the 20th C political divide in Europe - does anyone have any recommendations of music, mixes, comps etc which explore music from Eastern Bloc?
While on this theme, one really cool album I picked up a few years ago was this reissue of a Russian electronic jazz thing from 1990 - sounds a bit like something Moritz Von Oswald would come out with these days, by Vladimir Tarasov
I’ve got some of these Polish Funk compilations which have some great tracks, but nothing especially different to anything from Western Europe at the time.
Apparantly Italo was quite big in Poland during the '80s but I’ve yet to hear any succesful home grown version of it yet.
Here’s a couple of tracks by a Latvian band from 1980:
There’s a better known one from the same album called Pacific which is on Morgan Geist’s 2004 Unclassics compilation, but personally I find it a bit irritating.
Hotaru edit from a couple of years back. I will freely admit to not going that deep into the Wikipedia for Bajaga i Instruktori, but it sounds like they were /are quite the thing in Yugoslavia / Serbia
Lots of great stuff came out behind the Berlin Wall. I still have a load of this stuff stashed away somewhere. It’s interesting to hear how Western styles did insinuate themselves into the Eastern Bloc - which surprises me because very little Western music got commercial releases there.
Here’s a great track called Torpedo from the Novi Singers from the former Yugoslavia. They come across like Swingle Singers on acid (a very good thing, in my book👍).
Another off the same album, it sounds like a psychedelic version of Burt Bacharach’s South American Getaway (off the Butch Cassidy OST)
Another one that springs to mind - the OST to an east German TV series called Die Unsichtbare Visier (translates as ‘The Invisible Vizor’). I think this track got sampled by someone - can’t remember who though. It’s a kind of afro/easy/funk thing. The guy who composed the soundtrack (Walter Kubiczeck) is worth looking out for as he did quite a lot of good stuff.
Don’t know if you’re familiar with the Christoph Spendel Group, but he’s a Polish musician who made this super Balearic jazz music. He seems to have grown up in Germany. This is one of my faves:
