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Various: Greetings from Bulgaria cassette (Aon Productions, 1996)
This week I have another item from the big haul I picked up at Vinyl Conflict a couple of weeks ago. Now, I’m not a big collector of vintage cassettes. They’re too easily counterfeited, and even if they are truly what they purport to be, magnetic tape is prone to oxidation and other types of decay and damage that make me wary of sinking money into them. But there have been a few occasions when I’ve lucked into a stash of old tapes, and they’re definitely fun to pore over. While records feel like a mass market medium—you usually have to make at least a few hundred of them, which changes the way the artist interacts with their audience—tapes are more intimate. While a personalized mix tape is like a letter from one person to another, looking at and listening to hand-duplicated tapes can feel like the pre-internet version of eavesdropping on a group chat, getting a window into a small community with its own in-jokes and idioms. I love that so many 80s and 90s metal bands circulated rehearsal tapes, workshopping their ideas and getting feedback from trusted sources before they took their ideas to the masses.
The cassette I’m writing about today is called Greetings from Bulgaria, and it’s one of several hand-duplicated compilation tapes I picked up from Vinyl Conflict. According to Discogs, it was released in 1996, and from what I can tell the tape was compiled by Ivailo Tonchev, the person behind Aon Productions, who primarily released cassettes by Bulgarian bands, though they also put out a couple of compilation 7”s and cassettes by Scandinavian bands like S.O.D. (the Swedish one) and Valse Triste. The “pay no more than £2” note on the j-card flap indicates this copy reached me via Mitsey Distro, a tape distro apparently based in Sheffield. I’m curious about how that connection was formed and how this tape found its way into the world (maybe at some point I’ll find an ad for it in an old MRR when I’m scanning ads for the newsletter), but that information may be lost to the sands of time. It seems, though, that there have always been people like me who are interested in music from off the beaten path, and I probably picked it up used for the same reasons someone would have picked it up from Mitsey Distro thirty years ago.
The tape starts with a recording of an old Bulgarian political song, meant to set the background atmosphere as an example of the only music one could hear in behind-the-iron-curtain Bulgaria. It’s kind of what you’d expect, somewhere between a religious hymn and a military march, and it’s hard to imagine how it might excite anyone. It’s sounds like music not meant to express anything really, but merely to lend authority and mystique to the state. After hearing nothing but that all your life, hearing raw and expressive rock and roll must have felt like a total revelation.
The liner notes don’t say this explicitly, but the tape’s a-side features Bulgarian bands from before the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989. Most bands have two tracks, and the tape’s liner notes give some basic information about each band. A lot of them sound like second-wave UK punk bands, making the music it seems natural to make when you first pick up electric guitars and drums: basic beats and chord changes and a ton of passion. D.D.T. sounds kind of like Warsaw-era Joy Division, and Aon Productions later released a more extensive compilation of their recordings. U.Z.Z.U. is a little more complex, reminding me of Post Regiment’s early recordings with their commanding vocals and darkly melodic guitar riffs. Review is another standout who actually released an album on the state-run label Балкантон. The recordings are all very raw, and some of the masters are clearly damaged with drop-outs and other problems, but I don’t mind at all. It feels like these are transmissions from another world, and I’m grateful to have them at all.
The b-side of the tape features bands who, by and large, were contemporary with the compilation and presumably still active when it came out in 1996. I hate to say it, but this side of the tape is a lot less interesting. The bands on the a-side are all punk bands and they don’t sound all that different from the punk bands rich western countries produced, but there’s something special there. I’m really projecting here, but I’m guessing maybe the 80s bands had heard a few examples of punk rock, but mostly they knew punk rock was loud, fast, and angry, and they filled in whatever other gaps they needed to make their music with their intuition and with knowledge they inherited from their own cultures and backgrounds. The 90s bands, on the other hand, sound kind of like carbon copies of western bands. Several of them are straight edge bands playing various styles of youth crew and mosh-oriented hardcore, and there’s a band called Just a Product that sounds like they were weaned on the same Lookout! and Epitaph catalogs we Americans were choking down. I was going to shows by 1996, and by and large these bands sound exactly like the local and regional bands I was seeing as a teenager. I’m sure it was great for Bulgarians to have access to so much more music after their 1989 revolution, but I can’t help but feel like something was lost. I guess that’s capitalism’s main rub: it opens up a theoretical world of choice, but somehow that always gets reduced down to just a few generic-ass options.
So yeah, Bulgarian punk… who even knew it was a thing? I’m thrilled to know even this little bit about it, so kudos to the folks who originally made this cassette and to all the people exploring the wide world of music, homogenization be damned!