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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.

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