Opal Tapes profile the post-Soviet scene

A tape compilation covering artists from Moscow, Kiev, Kazan and beyond is among the label’s June batch.

Artists as diverse as Love Cult, Buttechno, Inga Mauer, Art Crime, Leonid Lipelis and Machine Woman suggest electronic music emanating from Russia and its surrounding countries is in good health right now. That’s an easy broad assumption to make for outsiders looking in – like us – but it is always preferable to be guided through a particular scene or movement by someone entrenched within it. A round of applause then to Opal Tapes whose June batch of cassettes features a tape compilation canvassing the East European area put together by Kazan-based producer YancityGurl.

Riffing on the abbreviated title that bound the countries together for much of the 20th Century, Ur Social Status Resistance is described as a ten-track insight into the “fecund scene of contemporary underground Moscow, Kazan, Kiev, Yekaterinburg and beyond.” You can hear the opening track from Yekaterinburg-based Rad Machine below with YancityGurl himself (yes he’s a male producer) among the subsequent nine contributors, all of whom are new names to us. YancityGurl, or Kirill as Opal Tapes call him, offers the following cryptic words to explain Ur Social Status Resistance: “This spirit of resistance to the canons of the social environment, the rage in the art, the natural form of the human soul.”

Opal Tapes will release USSR by various artists on June 3.

Tracklisting:

1. Rad Machine – Nightingale
2. Buwalda – Nas Krepyat
3. Ewan Limb – Le Douanier
4. Camin Mraz’ – Quagmire
5. Åmnfx – Please Do It Gently
6. Monotronique – Midnight Call
7. YancityGurl – Thou Shalt Not Forget
8. Yung Acid – Sonic
9. Low Tape – Sad But Thru
10. Внеземные соцветия (Extraterrestrial Infloresence) – Времени нет 1

Opal Tapes on Juno