Description
Improvisations for Russian flexi-discs (1960-80 vintage)
Two turntables and tape manipulations
Whilst visiting a shop in Melbourne specialising in Russian paraphrenalia, Rue came across a book of Soviet-era flexidiscs, containing Soviet propaganda recordings (Western music was hard to come by in the post WWII Soviet Union, although bootlegs flexidiscs of jazz and rock music pressed onto discarded medical x-rays, colloquially known ‘ribs’ or ‘bones’, were sort-after on the black market from the late 1940s to the 1960s). Rue used these flexidiscs as source material for ‘The Pre Glasnost Tapes’. Rue overlayed and juxtaposed patriotic workers songs with orchestral music, spoken Russian and natural sounds, altering pitch and timbre by adjusting record speed.
Originally released on Rue’s Pedestrian Tapes in 1991, ‘The Pre Glasnost Tapes’ has been reissued on several different occasions (on tape and CDR) with different covers; the one used here Rue views as the definitive cover.
Remastered by Shane Fahey, 2014
