Org Music is once again thrilled to be celebrating with participating record stores for the next Record Store Day on April 22. But this year the beloved label that cares as much about music as you do is bringing out a long-underground mystery in subversive Soviet punk history:
In 1989, the Ukrainian band Vopli Vidopliassova, darlings of the Soviet punk scene, released a semi-official cassette tape called Tantsi (“Dances”). The album contained songs in both Ukrainian and Russian and was recorded in one night, at an adrenaline-fueled DIY session in Kyiv.
It was intended by the band members to be nothing more than a demo tape. But soon fans started dubbing the cassette, and for connoisseurs of Soviet punk, the recording quickly gained cult status for its nervy and often hilarious songs poking fun at life in the last years of the USSR. In 2019, the original session tape was re-discovered, and in 2023, Tantsi finally gets its first official release.
As far as the band members go, Sasha Pipa (original bass player who left in the 2000s) was volunteering in the territorial defense and is now building drones. Skrypka and Sakhno (the drummer) have been fundraising touring. Their current guitar player, Zhenya Rohachevsky, was serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Featuring the original album fully re-mastered plus some rare bonus tracks, Tantsi is a time capsule from late Soviet Kyiv, where Ukrainian punks were rebelling against the repressive rule from the Kremlin, and imagining new horizons of possibility. Tantsi will be released on vinyl for the first time for Record Store Day 2023, limited to 2,000 copies worldwide.
Bloomsbury, the publisher of the lauded 33 1/3 books, is planning to release the 33 1/3 Europe Tantsi e-book by translator and curator Maria Sonevytsky on April 22, 2023. They are accelerating its official release date to coincide with the RSD drop of the album on Org Music.
