Various

Compiled from ultra-rare dead stock pressed at a Soviet-era vinyl plant in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, this first-of-its-kind fully licensed album is a supreme selection of Uzbek disco, Tajik electronic folk, Uyghur guitar licks, Crimean Tatar jazz, Korean brass, and genre-defying styles from Soviet Central Asia. Drop the needle, and you're not just hearing rare Soviet dance music. You're journeying along the Silk Roads, revisiting raucous USSR disco nights, and immersing in grooves that inspired Soviet youth to envision a different future, ultimately unraveling the Iron Curtain from within. Tracing an incredible historical throughline - from the gramophone engineers who'd been displaced from the Soviet Russia in 1941 after Stalin's reaction to Nazi invasion, to the establishing of a unique Uzbek pressing plant - Synthesizing Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco... is an unprecedented new anthology, capturing a small ream of a rarely-heard, authentic form of dance music (rarely heard outside of what was then the USSR, anyway).