Updated March 22, 2025 at 12:23 PM ET
In the late 1970s, Central Asia could seem to some like just another stagnating Soviet backwater.
News of the day praised economic achievements that weren't real — just as local communist leaders trumpeted a socialist future few truly believed in.
Yet change was stirring, at least if you had your ear to the ground.
That idea is at the heart of Synthesizing the Silk Roads, an anthology of rare Soviet Central Asian pop from roughly the decade that preceded the end of the USSR.
Released on Ostinato Records, an imprint that highlights overlooked corners of global music, the album captures Central Asia's role as a forgotten cultural stomping ground — where East met West in an echo of the region's trade routes of old.
"I can hear so many cultures mingling in this music," says Ostinato founder Vik Sohonie, who admits a longtime fascination for sounds "endearingly familiar but refreshingly new."
Synthesizing the Silk Roads contains both.
Are there shades of disco as Central Asia faced the 1980s? Sure. But strange synthesizers and Central Asian folk melodies give the dance music a more genre-bending twist.
Meanwhile, the collection offers contributions from musical acts that mirror the region's history as both a cultural crossroads and outpost for political exile.
Take Ariran — a brass band made up of ethnic Koreans whose descendants were forcibly resettled into Central Asia from Russia's Far East. The opening of their track "Pomni Menya (Remember Me)" sounds more like something out of Detroit's soul scene.
Or the propulsive garage rock of Yashlik, a Uyghur ensemble that has legions of fans throughout Central Asia to this day.
Collectively, the recordings make the case that the region's melting pot offered far more than Iron Curtain kitsch.
Sohonie argues that a closer listen reveals the rhythms — and dreams — of Central Asia's post-Soviet future.
"I think it's just a testament that (in) Central Asia … the word 'central' couldn't be stronger," explains Sohonie. "It's central to the entire world."
Tashkent Calling
For all of this we can thank Anvar Kalandarov.
An avid record collector in Uzbekistan's capital city of Tashkent, Kalandarov dug through the bargain bins at flea markets and traded with fellow music obsessives to amass a collection of rare LPs from the era.
In fact, his love affair with Central Asian vinyl ran so deep, it got to the point where it was not only cramping his apartment — but his marriage.
"My wife's a psychologist who treats people with addictions," says Kalandarov. "One day, she said to me: 'You have 2,000 records. Do you ever think about why you do this?'"
It was time, Kalandarov vowed, to finally share Central Asia's secret with the rest of us.
He and Sohonie had struck an online friendship trading rare 7-inch Central Asian records. Why not, they thought, try and finally put this overlooked music scene on the global map?
A record factory is born
Behind the collection lies a hidden history that dates back to World War II and an order by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to evacuate millions of Soviets out of the reach of the invading German armies.
Sound engineers — critical to the Soviet propaganda machine — were among the new arrivals to Central Asia. They came to form the backbone of the Tashkent Zavod Gramplastinok — the Tashkent Record Factory.
"By the early '60s, the factory was releasing music from all over Central Asia," explains Kalandarov. "And it was all recorded here in Tashkent. Little groups popped up everywhere."
Soon, the "factory" was churning out vinyl records by the millions on the state Melodiya label — with many of those LPs making their way into clubs and discos springing up in Tashkent and other cities across Central Asia.
Moreover, DJs wanted local artists in the rotation — putting a regional stamp for those letting off steam on the dance floor.
"We could get away with more. There weren't as many restrictions because we were so far from the censors in Moscow," says Natalia Nurumkhamedova, a popular Uzbek singer whose cheery "Nashi Ssori (Our Quarrels)" is featured in the collection.
She recalls a sense of relative freedom — a musical scene where she mixed Russian language songs with Uzbek folk tunes, Beatles melodies and occasional Ella Fitzgerald-inspired scats.
"We thought of ourselves as avant-garde," says Nurumkhamedova.
Despite the creative sounds and the energy on the dance floor, a Soviet Studio 54 this was not. Excesses were limited to the clubs' shadows.
This was still the USSR, after all.
More experimental Central Asian acts like Original — a standout of the new collection — faced harassment, even imprisonment, on orders of the KGB.
Another target of the Soviet authorities was the intriguing Minarets of Nessef. Made up of exiled Crimean Tatars, the group was active in the banned rights movement to return to their homeland in far-off Ukraine.
For his political activism, the group's leader, Enver Mustafayev, suffered years in a labor camp.
Ostinato Records' Sohonie doesn't ignore those dark chapters, but he argues that most Soviet officials just wanted in on the fun.
"They would come in under the banner of — 'Hey, we're here from the government and we don't like what you're doing,'" Sohonie says.
"But they wouldn't really do anything because it was their ticket to enter the club," he adds.
The winds of change
By the early 1990s, the biggest club of them all, the Soviet Union, was set to shutter its doors. Upheaval had gripped Moscow and it rippled across the USSR.
Central Asia gained its independence — with nationalist movements rebelling against Kremlin rule.
The political change also came at a cost: Millions fell into poverty.
The Tashkent Record Factory closed in 1991. Who needed Central Asian vinyl amid the triumph of Western culture — and the CD?
In preparing the compilation, Kalandarov says part of his mission was to track down and finally secure licensing agreements for Central Asian artists, many of whom were once household names but never received royalties.
"Some of these people aren't living as well as they should," says Kalandarov. "And they're not making what I would like, because the proceeds [from recordings] belonged to the state," he adds.
Meanwhile, Vik Sohonie says the music's "rediscovery" by new audiences fits a more contemporary narrative: the shift to a multipolar world, with new centers of influence rising in Eurasia and the Global South to compete with the West.
The concept has been exploited by autocrats to justify the unthinkable. Look no further than the Kremlin's actions in Ukraine.
Yet Sohonie argues that projects like Synthesizing the Silk Roads gives multipolarity a more positive and inclusive spin.
"This album is a soundtrack to a world that is changing very very rapidly," he says.
"The old networks that connected and integrated Asia with Europe — the old land routes, the Silk Roads — they're not coming back exactly. But they're slowly reemerging," Sohonie adds.
Arguably, the mere existence of the new collection mirrors that global message:
Ostinato is a Brooklyn-founded label Sohonie now runs out of Thailand. The music was curated by Kalandarov, an Uzbek who tracked down artists across Central Asia, Russia, Ukraine, even the United States.
Put another way, the times are a-changin'.
In fact, Synthesizing the Silk Roads makes the case they always were.
Copyright 2025 NPR
