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Re: [ARSCLIST] Soviet Recordings: labels
I'm working off of webmail and it is difficult to gather together all
of the threads from last week on Soviet Recordings, so I might miss
answering a few questions. First, the World Fair discs question from
Natalie. One shipment of 50,000 pressings was made in 1939.
Somewhere I have seen a listing of what was included, but I haven't
seen that list for quite a while. (I do have the catalog at hand of
the records imported for Expo 67 Montreal. They selected about 100
specific albums that time, and some of them were made ONLY for Expo in
the unusual format of 45 RPM 7-inch, a speed almost never used
domestically in the USSR.) In 1939 they selected perhaps 50 specific
couplings, and they were pressed with the special label in the
Aprelevsk pressing plant.
The Soviet histories make a big deal of this event, so they are
possibly the first mass export of records to the U.S. I think that
there may have been some sold in England before then as I have seen
earlier Soviet 78s in England. In 1936 the Soviets did a project with
RCA to get the technology of television and electrical sound
recording. This accounts for the sudden improvement in the sound
quality of Soviet records. Prior to that time they had exclusively
used home-grown equipment. There are reports that some of the TV
engineers sent to Camden to start the project were not to be found in
Moscow the following year when the RCA engineers went to the USSR --
they had been purged. This might also have happened in the sound
recording dept. but we're not sure. Tourism was almost non-existant
between the USA and USSR in those years, so there were few casual
imports.
The relationship between the Soviets and Stinson Trading has been told
elsewhere in books about leftist folk singers, and I can't travel
around to other pages while working on this. The American pressings
of Soviet material on the smaller sized label may have started to fill
in sold-out items in the Soviet pavilion at the fair. But I have
never come across an American pressing that reproduced the full label
including the Worlds Fair titling at the top. That is only on the
Soviet pressings. After those first American pressings, Stinson and
Keynote continued to make pressings of Soviet recordings using their
regular label formats. These were sold as singles and combined into
albums. Eric Bernay/Bernstein owned Keynote, and I forget what his
relationship with Stinson was. Some sources claim that he was an
active Communist. Herbert Harris and Irving Prosky were the original
owners of Stinson Trading, and appear to have operated the sales
concession at the Soviet pavilion at the fair, and then continued with
a wider distribution after the fair with their own pressings.
(Although it has been earlier claimed on this list that Moe Asch owned
Stinson, I don’t think that was the case. It looks like he only had a
temporary distribution deal in the mid-40s when he was re-organizing
and also needed a greater shellac allotment. There was some sort of
financial partnership, but Asch Records and Stinson Records seem to
have always been separately managed.) I have one Worlds Fair Soviet
pressing and about 15 of the Stinson and Keynote pressings.
Quoting Roger and Allison Kulp <thorenstd124@xxxxxxxxx>:
Has anybody ever attempted a complete Melodiya/CCCP/MK/Akkord/
Dolo... (whatever) discography ?
Yes and no. Obviously there is the Bennett LP discography but it does
not cover much beyond classical. There also is the hardbound MK
"Soviet Long Playing Records 1965-66" catalogue, but since MK stands
for the Russian name "International Books" it only includes the
records eligible to be exported. They did not do any similar
compilation ever again, but did have monthly export catalog brochures
of records newly available, and they did combine these into annual
issues. In the mid-80s this was also a feature in the monthly
magazine "Music In The USSR." These listings included new issues as
well as records from the past that had been given another pressing.
You must remember that the Soviet record industry did not operate on
popularity. If a record sold out, it sold out and was unavailable
until maybe, just maybe, three or five years later the committee in
Moscow might authorize another pressing. Collectors IN the USSR had a
monthly magazine Melodiya which likewise printed a list of new issues
and re-pressings, and naturally these lists include records that MK
would not be exporting, and thus would not list in their publications.
THAT is where you find rock, jazz, estrada, and ephemeral
recordings. With rare exceptions, none of these publications included
singles, and never the flexies, especially the monthly Horizon
magazine that included 12 flexies. But single flexies were a major
source of pop music, and I have some records that came out on both
vinyl and flexy. Flexies always had illustrated sleeves.
There also were extensive discographies compiled by collectors,
especially the man I call the Brian Rust of Russia, Valirie
Shafoshkin. When I visited him in 1995 he stunned me by showing a
hand-written version of what we could call the Complete Soviet
Entertainment Discography. His goal was to publish performer
discographies as part of books of the lyrics of their songs to be
included in the book series of poetry that is very popular in Russia.
He did not understand that their might be an interest in the
publication of the discography as a discography. I did not understand
his idea, but he did reach his goal. There is a series of books that
include bios, lyrics, and a discography of 10 or 20 performers. He
had started on a series that would have a whole book devoted to one
artist, but he passed away two years ago after publishing only three
of these. Mind you, these books are totally in Russian and published
only there, but in addition to the two that Valarie sent me with
wonderful dedications, I have been lucky to have found almost all of
them in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn bookstores. But it is the luck of
the find. I tried desperately to bring him over to the U.S. to speak
at ARSC, show him the country, and get him in contact with publishers
like Greenwood, but our damn State Dept. wouldn’t give him a visa
because they thought he would stay here. What?? And leave his
records behind???????????? That would have been crazy. He never
thought of not returning. He had his publishing there to do, and
after having a turntable from KAB brought over, he put out about 30
CDs from his collection on several different labels.
But even if you add all of these together, you would still not have a
full discography of Soviet records, but I think it could still be
done. This leads me to Roger’s other questions which actually are
about the post-Soviet era.
And is Aufon still in operation over there ?Aufon,was an early 90s/
Yeltsin-era label,that was a successor label to Melodiya.I have an
Aufon press of the 1st Led Zeppelin Lp,that turns up once in a
while. The cover was printed on the backs of old Soviet government
maps.
cut up into 12" squares.There are also Aufon pressings of Lps by
Queen,Wings,and The Rolling Stones I am aware of.If you do a
search on eBay/Amazon for "Russian CD",you see some bootlegs,
but mostly US-type Russian-language pop,with no labels named anywhere.
As Fibber McGee would say, what a mis of mass information. Where to
begin. Ah, that is easy. What you read as Aufon, isn’t. Now before
you think that I am making fun of you, I’m not. I also misread this
label name for quite a while. It is not Aufon, it is AnTrop. Huh?
It is the trademark of Andrey Tropillo, a rock promoter in Leningrad
in the 80s who became a go-getter in St. Petersburg in the 90s. If
you have a copy of his LP of Sgt. Peppers, P91 00117, you will see
that two faces are changed. One is his, and the other is Nikolay
Vasin, who was the head of the Beatles fan club in St. Petersburg.
In order to read the trademark you have to know what Cyrillic looks
like when written in script. The A is the same, but what you see as a
“u” is the script “n” in Cyrillic. The tall vertical line that is
crossed is not an “f” but is a “T”. There is an English R inside the
O, both as a play on the copyright symbol, but as two more letters.
Then at the end, what you see as an “n” is a script Cyrillic “p.”
AnTrop.
AnTrop was not really a successor label to Melodiya. It is more
complicated than that. Melodiya was originally a headquarters
building in Moscow which supposedly houses the tape archive, an
adjacent recording studio which also had the equipment to cut masters
and make the metal parts, and six or seven pressing plants. When the
Soviet Union was broken up, all of these parts of Melodiya were split
up on their own. The headquarters building kept the Melodiya
trademark and intended to have its records manufactured just like
before in the pressing plants. The recording studio, however, took
the trademark Russian Disc and continued supplying metal parts to the
pressing plants to make records with the Russian Disc trademark.
During the initial confusion there were some LPs issued with both the
Melodiya and Russian Disc logos on the cover, but the discs had
Russian Disc labels. The head of the Melodiya headquarters building
told me in no uncertain terms that Russian Disc and Melodiya were
separate operations. He was still rather upset that they had set out
on their own.
The Moscow pressing plant had just been totally converted to press
only CDs, and had been pressing Melodiya CDs for a year or two. This
continued, but they had become a joint venture with the trademark
Gramzapis. At first they pressed CDs for Melodiya, Russian Disc, and
Gramzapis labels, but by 1993 the Moscow Mafia had completely taken
over this plant and it became completely pirate. Melodiya started
again to press in Austria and this led to the joint venture with
Bertlesman in Germany. Luckily an honest CD plant had opened in
Enkatrinburg, and most legit CD pressings were made there. The
largest vinyl pressing plant was about 25 miles SW of Moscow in
Aprelvsk. They had the only facilities to provide raw vinyl, so all
the other plants were still dependent on it, just as they also were to
the Moscow recording studio for metal parts. They formed a joint
venture with an American company and became Aprelevka Sound, Inc.
They pressed records under their own trademark and also pressed 20 or
more of the new labels including Gala, GNC, Moroz, Orfea, and Russian
Sound until June 1995. About 3 weeks before I arrived for my Summer
in Moscow, the head of Aprelevka Sound was assassinated, and the
pressing plant closed. All I got to see and videotape were the
offices in the building Herr Moll had built in 1906, the outside of
the factory building, and the museum about a half mile away. As far
as I know they never resumed vinyl pressing but they might have
continued to do cassette duplicating.
The Riga pressing plant became a joint venture with one or two of the
members of the rock group Time Machine. The factory was known as
RiTonis, and the major label was Sintez, along with Russian Disc.
They pressed mostly Russian rock. The St. Petersburg plant may have
taken the name Peterfon, Ltd., but its main client seems to have been
AnTrop.
If you do a search on eBay/Amazon for "Russian CD",you
see some bootlegs, but mostly US-type Russian-language
pop,with no labels named anywhere.
If you are talking about LPs, not CDs, I can tell you that most of the
rock records of Western performers with no label name probably come
from the factory in Tblisi, Georgia. Some might also come from
Tashkent, Uzbeckistan. These plants were small, and during the Soviet
years their pressings were rarely seen in Russia up North. They
mainly filled in the need for copies in the south. When the Soviet
Union broke up, these plants had to press SOMETHING. Remember
however, they were dependent on the Moscow recording studio for their
metal parts, so there had to be some collusion there. It is
practically unknown that LPs of Russian rock groups have no
identification or label names. If eBayers can’t identify them it is
because they do not understand how the Russian record industry worked
and how the records of the new labels were marked. As for sleeves
being printed on the back of old Soviet maps, I’ve never seen any,
especially from AnTrop in St. Petersburg which was a major operation.
Perhaps they were confused by the inner sleeve wrapper from RiTonis in
Riga which printed an ancient map of Riga.
What was the last Melodiya record issued,BTW ? The last two I have,
both date from 1990.One is a fairly rare 7" EP,of Iggy Pop recorded
live in Paris,in 1977,and live in Detroit,in 1980 (C92-30481),and a
record of Chopin preludes,by Igor Zhukov.
Apart from the 1992 sleeves that have both the Melodiya and Russian
Disc logos, I would say the last new vinyl issue with the Melodiya
trademark would be in 1991. I have a couple in the 31000 range. In
late 1991 the matrix numbering changed from C (stereo) and A (digital)
prefixes to R (Russia) and P (Petersburg) starting at 01. Earlier
numberings were maintained in repressings, and there were some later
albums that had been cut before the numbering changed that had album
numbers that differed from the matrix numbers. For example, I have a
1991 RiTonis pressing of Sintez 1-059-C-6 with matrix numbers C60
32459/460.
Does Sony/BMG own the name "Melodiya" exclusively now ?
Roger
I would say no, they never owned it ever. It was always a licensing
deal. It is still owned by the Moscow headquarters building. They
still issue CDs in Russia with that trademark.
Let me say something about Russian CDs. There HAS been an effort to
completely catalog them. In 1994 my friend Alexander Tikhonov and a
friend of his published a discography which listed and illustrated
every Russian CD with the exception of the earlier ones from Melodiya
and Gramzapis which had published their own illustrated catalogs.
Although I don’t think they have published an update, Alexander
continued to list the new issues each year in the yearbook of the
entertainment news bureau he works for, InterMedia. I have several of
the issues from the later 1990s.
If you are interested in Russian CDs, you do not have to go to Russia.
Just go to New York. Take the D train to Brighton Beach where you
will find 5 or 6 stores that sell Russian books, CDs, and videos. It
is not as exciting as it was ten years ago when almost all CDs were
between $2 and $4. While some of the older ones are still this cheap,
in the last year or so the price of new releases has gone up to $7 to
$9 or more. This is a tribute to the hard work that Alexander’s
cataloging and the IFPI have done to cut back drastically on
counterfeiting and piracy. In the 1990s the counterfeit and piracy
rate was over 90%, and as the head of Aprelevka Sound found out, it
was a dangerous business. Let me add a true story. Alexander brought
me to the office of the man who had been the manager of the Gramzapis
factory when it was converted to CDs in 1988. He gifted me with a
copy of the first pressing to come out of that factory, one that
reproduced the signatures of the installation team. He told me he and
his assistant quit when the Mafia took over, and they now ran a tiny
cassette company. It was so tiny, the production machinery was a pair
of four-holer cassette duplicators. They needed to stay under the
Mafia’s radar. I asked him about a CD I had bought here in Kentucky
in 1993. It was a Melodiya CD of the Rolling Stones. On my
videotape you can see his face drop. He was dismayed that I knew of
it. “Yes,” he sadly told me, “I was responsible for it. It was the
only pirate CD that every came out while I was running the plant, but
it wasn’t my fault. Andrey Tropillo brought it to us and he had all
sorts of contracts and licenses and legal documents to prove that he
had the rights to the recordings. So we pressed it, and then later
found out it was illegal. But nothing else illegal was pressed there
until I was forced out.”
Roger also wrote:
I just uncovered a CCCP lighthouse 78,that I think dates from 1953,
by Galina Mieserova,that was pressed in The Soviet Union for export.
(Two Chopin etudes,and a Khachaturian tocatta.)All writing on the
label is in English.It does not appear to be a Stinson pressing.
The lighthouse label was usually used by the Aprelevka pressing plant
and will say so in Cyrillic above the spindle hole. If all of the
writing is in English there and if it is manufactured under the 1956
GOST, there will be an (a) in parentheses after the matrix number on
the label. Other languages were represented by other letters in
parentheses. Records pressed under the 1950 GOST do not have the
language indicator after the number. There is no reason to think that
it might be a Stinson pressing as they were not pressing Soviet
recordings this late and never used any repro of a Soviet label other
than the center of the 1939 Worlds Fair label. Other Soviet
recordings on Stinson or Keynote used the regular Stinson or Keynote
label format.
Mike Biel mbiel@xxxxxxx
Quoting Thomas Stern <sternth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Here is a website with many images of Russian record labels....
Best wishes, Thomas.
http://www.collectable-records.ru/labels/RUSSIA/PRE-REVOLUTION
LABELS/index.htm
<http://www.collectable-records.ru/labels/RUSSIA/PRE-REVOLUTION%20LABELS/index.htm>
Natalie Zelensky wrote:
Dear ARSC-memebers,
Thanks so much for your responses -- they have brought me closer to
unveiling this mystery. Your answers have spawned several more
questions, which I am hoping you can answer:
Do you know whether or not the records imported for the 1939
World's Fair were the first Soviet records imported to the US? If
not, does anyone know definitively which were the first? Does
anyone know the label names of the 1939 World's Fair records of
Soviet music and/or the repertoire contained on these records?
Does anyone know which came first: records from the Soviet Union,
or US made (or pressed) records of Soviet songs? Record labels for
either?
For the record (pardon the pun), I am trying to find information
regarding recordings of Soviet music in the US, including both
imported and those made/pressed in the US. Thank you very much,
Natalie
----------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:05:33 -0500
From: dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Soviet Recordings
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
There's no one "World's Fair" recording..lots of titles were
exported over here with those labels in 1939 (although my
understanding is that the records came but the Russians didn't,
because of impending war). Once those pressings were sold off,
Stinson Trading Corp. had new masters dubbed from them and
continued to sell them as US pressings.
I'm sure others will have lots to add..Mike Biel, where are you?
dl
Natalie Zelensky wrote:
Hello, I am trying to gather information on the early
distribution of Soviet recordings in the US.
1. What was the first recording of Soviet songs that was
released in the US? (year?; label? contents?) 2. I also am
trying to find more information regarding subsequent distribution
of recordings of Soviet songs in the US. (Labels?; History?;
Would the companies simply copy from eachother and resell under
their respective labels?). Based on my research in American and
Russian-American papers, it appears that Stinson and the "Am-Rus
Music Corporation" were the first distributors of these records -
is this true? Does anyone know anything else about this
"Am-Rus" company? 3. Could anyone tell me more about the
"World's Fair" recording. (Year?; Contents?; Performers?). 4.
Does anyone have any suggestions for sources about early Soviet
recordigs in the US?
Thank you very much.
N. Zelensky
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