From Uzbek disco to Uighur rock: Forgotten sounds of the Silk Road

A new album of rare grooves from Soviet Central Asia reveals an era when the region was a crucible for musical fusion.

On an early morning car ride from Tashkent to Samarkand after a performance in 1983, the Uzbek pop singer Nasiba Abdullaeva tuned in to an Afghan radio station by accident and found herself entranced by a song that was playing.

“From its first notes, the song fascinated me, and I fell in love with it,” Abdullaeva recalled. She asked the driver to pull over so she could quickly memorise the lines. “I didn’t have a pen and paper, so I just asked everyone to be silent.”

Abdullaeva turned that track, originally by Afghan artist Aziz Ghaznawi, into a cover that was eventually released as the groove-laden Aarezoo Gom Kardam (I Lost My Dream), sung wistfully in Dari. Released in 1984, it shot to popularity in Central Asia, the Caucasus – and even became a hit in Afghanistan.

Forty years later, that cover is the opening song on a new compilation released in August by Grammy-nominated Ostinato Records called Synthesizing the Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uighur Rock, Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asia, which unearths an eclectic sonic era from the dusty crates of history.

In the shadow of the Iron Curtain dividing the former Soviet Union and its communist allies from the West, the anaesthetising drone of state-approved folk ballads often dominated the airwaves.

But during Soviet rule in the 1970s and 1980s, a vibrant musical underground was simultaneously blossoming in lands where cultures had mingled for centuries. Artists from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and beyond were forging a sound unlike anything heard in the USSR.

Imagine German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk getting lost in a