Some do New Music Monday. I like to do Tatty Tunes Tuesday.
And so there I was about to fire up another Drum and Bus Show when R pinged me early on Tuesday morning.
Hey! Are you enjoying that current toe-tapper that everyone is talking about? Synthesising the Silk Roads… somehow passed me by on the Smooth Radio playlist this week.
Blimey.
And so what we have here is forgotten underground music from 1980s Soviet Central Asia. As the title suggests, it fuses disco, rock, electronica with traditional Silk Road folk and jazz. It’s not going to bother the top 40 anytime soon.
A lot of the album comes from dead stock vinyl that was pressed in the Soviet era plants in Uzbekistan. If dear old Andy Kershaw was still with us, he’d be having multiple wet dreams over this.
It’s not for the faint-hearted but then again it really is quite accessible compared to some of the crap I try and silence on the radio these days. I barely get beyond two to three minutes of any contemporary station before Alexa is told to change.
I’m always up for experimentation, and synthesising the Silk Roads is a step in the right direction. You’d go pretty batshit crazy if this was your only musical exposure. It’s all about dipping in and dipping out of different styles and tastes.
I continued the game of musical ping-pong. I pinged back over to R Redman International and We Run Things. This is a 40-track compilation of Ddgi dub from the early to mid-1980s.
It’s not a million miles away from Synthesising the Silk Roads in terms of aspirations, if not influences. Music is all the much better when different genres blend together. Digi and dub work just as well as disco and Uzbekistan folk.
Fancy that.