Another Compilation. Since not every artist and band could have his own record the eastern labels made alot of Compilations. This way smaller or more unknown bands could have atleast one song featured on such a compilation. “Rhythmus” was annually released from 1971 to 1979 and its mostly funk/jazz influenced rock music, with german lyrics of course.

The Song I chose today is B4 – Pantha Rei+Veronika Fischer “Hier und nebenan” and it sounds like a T-Rex-coverversion, but I am not sure about that, I have never listened much to T-Rex to be honest. Maybe someone can shed some light on this.

As always, you can try to get this one on gemm.com.

Another “a la carte” record, this time it’s jazz (and its in stereo too, but has nothing to do with the “Stereo a la carte” record).
This is a compilation giving an overview about parts of the czecheslovakian jazz-scene at that time. This is really a great record, filled with very energetic and smooth Jazz, one of the records I pop on my turntable quite often. For someone totally new to chzecheslovakian jazz this might be a good record to begin with, but it seems to be rare. Bands featured include Hot Breath, Combo FH, Jazz Q and Jazz Sanatorium.

The Song I chose for today is B1 SHQ-”morning of a faun”, one of the best songs on this record. Altough the record itself was done in 1980 this song is from 1977.

It’s actually quite hard to find exactly this “Jazz a la carte” on gemm.com, maybe just take a look for records from SHQ, there are some for sale there.

This is one of those “technical demonstration” records about the effects possible with stereo recording, however it’s a little bit different from other records I heard where it’s basically one instrument being panned from left to right and back. Each song tells a story, and its quite a crazy record with lots of styles and little ideas about “stereo” in general. The song I chose is A7 – “All die schönen Tage”. The story of this song is about a small jazzband playing a song in a room while outside the window a big brass-band comes along playing the same song. Use headphones for this one or make sure to have a good stereoimage from your speakers, you will enjoy that.

As always, you can try your luck with this one on gemm.com but it seems to be quite rare. (When looking, be aware that the label is Amiga, not Decca).

Okay, this record is a bit of a mystery to me. First of all I can’t understand much of russian language. I had it in school for a few years but forgot almost everything about it. I still can read kyrillic letters though, and I know that “300 let” means “300 years”, But I am not sure if that is the title of the record or something else, the backside shows that the songs are done by various bands, so I just assume that this is VA.
Somehow I also have the feeling that this record is refering to the “Black Sea“, giving the picture of the beach and all (the black sea was one of the favourate and high-class vacation areas in russia back in the communist era, as a matter of fact it still is). But I can be totally wrong really.

Edit : And I am, as you can read below in the comments.

The record itself is rather enjoyable, altough being made in the mid-80s it features no synths of any form, it’s really all straight big-band style, a few songs being great for listening and a few songs providing good samples.

The song I chose today is A3-”Komsomol Irkutska”, and it is a good example for the type of “disco” I was referring about at “Zodiac”. It has disco-chords, -rhythms and -instruments, but the music is not really “driving”, keeps switching between some march- and dancestyle and the lyrics are obviously highly political, given the fact that “Komsomol” was the political organisation for the youth in Russia and “Irkutsk” is a city in Syberia. Also if you listen closely you can spot words like “fascist” in the vocals.

Got this record from one of my trips to the Czech Republic.

This thing seems to be ultra-rare but you can still try to find it on www.gemm.com.