VARIOUS - Experimental Sounds Behind The Iron Curtain

This double LP compilation is a meeting of musicians and artists that never happened. They never shared the same stage, and their activities never combined into a movement. Mostly active in the 1970s and 1980s in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People’s Republic of Poland, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic, the groups and individuals who feature on this record were often divided by the insular and paranoid policies of the communist states in which they lived.

Yet, they belonged to a richly imagined and stimulating commonwealth of ideas, images and desires.

Some of the music was recorded during energetic public concerts; some of it was laid down in home-made studios, and some in state recording facilities. Improvisation – when access to stages and equipment were carefully rationed by power – was not just a matter of musical extemporisation: it was often the result of necessity. All of it, in all its diversity, shares a common thread of provocative ideas and emancipation through musical expression.

This compilation signals the coming together of four different projects which have been covering overlooked histories and alternative art in the former Eastern Bloc and Yugoslavia in the second half of the 20th century: Germany’s Major Label and Zonic platform, Poland’s Notes From the Underground exhibition and Portugal’s Unearthing the Music project.