TONIGHT from 7-10 PM EDT on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio: So fierce was singer, musician, and composer Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum refused for decades to work with him, fearing he’d upstage her. When the two finally collaborated, they produced several of Kalthoum’s greatest songs, including Enta Omri, Fakarouni, and Laylet Hob. This tribute focuses on rare 45s, LPs, and cassettes of Abdel Wahab’s own recordings, with a few covers and songs written for others woven in.
Download the whole cassette here
Azaz (1988)
Developed in 1962 by the Philips Company, the first cassette tapes were released on August 30, 1963, at the Berlin Radio Show. This episode of Bodega Pop presents a three-hour celebration of the format focused on international cassette-only releases sourced from compilations, music blogs, friends, and Gary’s personal collection. HT to Andrew Simon for alerting us to this anniversary.
As of this writing, nearly 700,000 people have seen the post and over 11,500 have liked it. Dozens have commented on it, many asking for me to rip and share the music somewhere.
I didn't really expect, or want, to do that, in part because the primary experience for me had less to do with the sonic quality of the tape and everything to do with its physical (including but not limited to its sonic) reality.
My experience involved listening, but listening while cognizant of the tape wheels spinning, of the artifacts assembled in front me, of being able to run my thumb along the felt stitched images gracing the patches, of smelling the aging paper on which the letter and flyers had been printed, of feeling the weight of the cassette case in my hand, feeling and hearing it creaking open and closed, and of the memories of my own taping and sharing music that all of this brought up for me -- to say nothing of the experience of imagining myself in Chris or Darren's shoes, listening to this then-mysterious music for the first time, or -- even more mind-blowing -- imagining myself as Vit, with a history and knowledge of this music, assembling a package to share with new pen-pals overseas, that feeling of here I am, this is me, this is a culture that I never could have guessed I would be sharing -- I mean, it's almost too much to emotionally process.
For those who want to track down Russian punk (or rock, pop, disco, etc.), it's worth spending a few hours on this wildly expansive Russian Music blog. (It wouldn't hurt to learn Cyrillic first, which you can easily do in a day -- it's not a particularly complicated alphabet.)
Alternately, I've broadcast a few Russian punk and punk-adjacent episodes over the last decade, including:
City of Gold: Leningrad 1974-1991
Yegor and Yanka (Grazhdanskaya Oborona aka Civil Defense)
Mike and Tsoi (Zoopark and Kino, respectively)
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