Eastern Crates

Melodiya, USSR, 1986

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.

• VA - Jazz a la carte
• Karel Gott - Die Neue LP
• Zodiac - Disco Alliance