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I always feel a bit hesitant writing about dance music because I feel like I don’t know enough about it to talk about it with any insight or authority. This is true, but I do listen to quite a lot of it and have a fair few dance/electronica records in my collection, even if the kind of dance music that I like is not the kind of dance music that you can actually dance to!
I haven’t been able to find out much about this label, but Gost Zvuk are a reasonably new label from Russia that put out minimal techno with a strong DIY approach and ethic. I think they have only put out about 7 or 8 releases so far (a combination of 12″s and full albums) and the information online is kind of scrappy (one website claims that Gost Zvuk means ‘Ghost Sounds’, which sounds reasonable to me, but another said that it translates as ‘state standards for sound’….which seems unlikely somehow, but could also be true) and incomplete.
Like a lot of new records that I buy, I got into Gost Zvuk just through reading the description of their first 12″ on the card in the record shop and being attracted to the aesthetic of the presentation. The stark plain black sleeves and hand-stamped labels of the first few white labels were all in Cyrillic alphabet with no concessions to an audience outside Russia, which instantly appealed to my sense of curiosity and the indie elitist in me!
I have no idea who or what I’m listening to as it is all written in Cyrillic, but I like the DIY sound, the minimal beats, and the excursions into dance music’s past that lurches between deep house, experimental drone, and ethereal soundscapes that manage to sound at once retro and forward-looking.
Here’s the playlist which may or may not contain tracks by Lapti, Buttechno (who I think is the same person as Lapti), AEM Rhythm Cascade, OL, Alekski Nikitin, Nocow and Piper Spray:
