#melodiya

Self Care

Sən necə bir şeysən?

İnsanın tam içindən, ruhunu titrədən bir əsər.

İlahi pərvərdigara, musiqinin universal dilinə aşiq olmayanllar utansın. Onun o gücü, həm yaralayan, həm də yaralara dərman olan o gücü. Sonra bu mahnı.

Sonra da iç yanğısı.

Suallar, suallar....

Although I am writing about music in the USSR, I am far from nostalgy and from loving that state. Most of the technically complex goods in the union were copied from the Europeans, Americans and Japanese. In rare cases it was licensed, like Zhiguli cars, but often it was simply disassembled and rebuilt on Soviet components, like Yamaha HP-1 headphones, which were called TDS-5 (I owned both, USSR is a cheap one).

In the case of records, and specifically Melodiya, it was much the same. But the deeper I dug, the more ridiculous the official story seemed.

What’s Wrong With Melodiya

If you look at wikipedia or other typical sources, you'll see the same thing everywhere: Melodiya was founded in 1964, the biggest company, a monopolist, wow! BTW, recently they released a book about their records and right in the announcement the unknown author again says that «"Melodiya" was the main and the only record label in the Soviet Union». They omits only a couple of details. First, how did the largest record production company emerge from nothing? Russian Wikipedia article cautiously specifies that it was “based on existing factories”. They built factories, I guess? No way. Further a little less carefully they write “nationalized”, but, of course, do not specify how exactly. In general, briefly about the factories that suddenly became “Melodiya”: - Aprelevsky (April), the biggest one: USSR took the factory from the German Moll after the revolution - Moscow plant: initially USSR took the machines from the French Pathe at the same time in 1910s - Leningrad plant: USSR took the machines from the Germans in '45 - Riga plant: USSR took the factory together with the whole Latvia in '40 - Tbilisi plant: USSR bought the machines from USA - Tallinn plant: USSR bought the machines from Germany. Then, at the time of the unification of plants in '64 and for some time after, there were a lot of small enterprises in the Union, producing their own records, which then simply closed down. Melodiya and that's it. By the way, Melodiya, which has been selling its archive of classics to the West for the last 20 years, was once again resold in 2020 for a fraction of its real value through a strange (as always in Russia) government tender. In addition to the book, the Melodiya website sells a T-shirt, a panama and a bag as a merchandise.

Original experimental records before vinyl

Was it something of its own in USSR, not copied and not taken away from someone? Before the WWII, yes. For example, amazing experimental factories that tried, obviously, to replace shellac with something (the invention of a suitable plastic/vinyl was yet to come). But there is very little information about them. All this disappeared; only rare surviving records made of something like rubber remain.

Experimental record from 1930s