Hi guys! A new compilation here, and something a little unusual this time. I remember someone asking here for some new wave from USSR, and also last year lots of people discovered a song "Na zare" by Alliance, which made quite a few curious about whether there was any kind of new wave/synthpop scene in the USSR. So I decided to dig and came up with quite a few examples. Still, the answer is complicated - while there were songs and even albums in that style (or rather approximation of it), there was never really a "new wave scene" as such. Those often were experiments with fashionable Western sounds, and artists could fluctuate between new wave/synthy stuff, eurodisco-derived music and hard'n'heavy rock during their evolution. And with state-controlled music environment there simply could never be any kind of independent full-fledged movement, only underground activity in home studios (only state-approved musicians could record in "real" studios, those were rare and queue to record in them stretched for years sometimes).
And yet there was a very developed tape network with USSR-wide and very fast tape-copy services. So while this music rarely saw the light of day on vinyl, it thrived on cassettes, which were the medium if you wanted to listen to new music, both home-grown and foreign. Therefore lots of songs I'm going to post are taken from digitized tapes - bear that in mind regarding quality, in many cases even faulty tapes are all we have. Though mostly they're alright Oh yes, I'm doing it all in mp3, as there's no real point in lossless given the sources of the music and besides often mp3s are all I have and I don't like to mix formats.
The first compilation is here: https://mega.nz/file/2k1D1CoL#XFbYRsTju ... yXOMNMntGA
It's rather technological/futuristic thematically, which was very novel for the USSR then. If there's interest, I can give little comments for each song and performer.
Enjoy and let me know what you think, especially if there's a need to continue