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Sounding Plastic: The “Great Career” of the Flexidisc in Socialist Poland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2024
Abstract
This essay asks what archival sound objects—in this case a vast stockpile of bootleg music recordings—can tell us about cultures of listening and the cultivation of intimacy through sound under state socialism. It combines ethnographic and historical methodologies to analyze a format for popular music that circulated through an alternative economy in the People's Republic of Poland from the 1950s through the 1980s: the “sound postcard” (pocztówka dźwiękowa). These flimsy, often colorful, plastic rectangles contained copies of mainstream western, Polish, and Soviet popular musics on seven-minute records, sold hand-to-hand at markets and kiosks. In the twenty-first century, these polyethylene flexidiscs circulate as socialist ephemera with a nostalgic thrill, cherished for their obsolescence and provocative visual design reconstruct, but dismissed as poor fidelity transfers. I treat this archive as material history that contains aural traces allowing us to access socialities, affective experiences, and labor relations.
- Type
- Critical Discussion Forum: Socialist Sound Worlds
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
References
1 Thanks to Mark Katz, Michael Palm, and Elodie Roy, as well as the conveners of this critical forum for generous engagement with this essay. I am very grateful for conversations with sound postcard makers and listeners from 2016–20 that were crucial as I sought to write about these material objects’ social histories and afterlives. I am grateful for support from Viktoria Tkaczyk and the community of the “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics” research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who hosted me and funded fieldwork in spring 2019.All translations of Polish text, including in the image captions, are the author’s.
2 Other popular music fans “hacked” communist government owned equipment to make bootleg records, see Zhuk, Sergei I., Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Washington, DC, 2010), 82–84Google Scholar. I do not wish to imply the sound postcard is uniquely Polish, simply bountiful and notable in People’s Poland.
3 Michael Denning, “Decolonizing the Ear: The Transcolonial Reverberations of Vernacular Phonograph Music,” 25–44; and Jones, Andrew, “Circuit Listening: Grace Chang and the Dawn of the Chinese 1960s,” both in Radano, Ronald and Olaniyam, Tejumola, eds., Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Durham, 2016), 66–91Google Scholar; Devine, Kyle, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (Cambridge, Mass., 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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8 Instructions for how to build, use, and tailor the presses that could make consumer goods from polyethylene were widely available. For example, Hyla, Izabela, “Niektóre zagadnienia technologii wyprasek z tworzyw sztucznych,” Zeszyty Naukowe Mechanika 25, no. 147 (1966), 53–62Google Scholar.
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13 Roman Waschko, “Poland Gets Foreign 45s,” Billboard (September 1, 1979), 54.
14 Thomas Y. Levin, “Before the Beep: A Short History of Voice Mail,” in Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo Van Leeuwen, eds., VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 27–29.
15 Aleksandra Kremer, The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 2021), 39–43.
16 Here I follow the understanding of format developed by Marek Jancovic, Alexandra Schneider, and Axel Volmar, who write that “Format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a technology can operate.” See Marek Jankovic, Axel Volmar, and Alexandra Schneider, eds., Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media (Lüneburg, Germany, 2020), 11.
17 Arthur A. Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg, Bird Songs of Garden Woodland and Meadow (Washintgon DC, 1964). Book that features audio recordings of birdsong, book and birdsong album appear to have the same name.
18 Tadeusz Kaczyński, Rozmowy z Witoldem Lutosławskim (Kraków, 1972).
19 Andrea F. Bohlman, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland (New York, 2020); Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago, 1993); David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Durham, 2013), 198–226; Andrew Simon, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford, 2023).
20 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, 2003), 215–86; Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett, eds., Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound (New York, 2015), 21–28.
21 Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, “Introduction: Remapping Sound Studies in the Global South,” in Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, eds., Remapping Sound Studies (Durham, 2019), 11.
22 Jonathan Bach, What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany (New York, 2017), 49.
23 Roman (pseudonym), informal conversation, Berlin, April 14, 2017.
24 This was likely an intermediary reel-to-reel tape player, commonly used in the transfer process. See the discussion of the makes from other socialist industries—the East German Smaragd and the Sonet “Tesla” from Czechoslovakia in Maria Szabłowska and Krzysztof Szewczyk, Ludzkie Gadanie: Życie, rock and roll i inne nałogi (Kraków, 2013), 22.
25 Lisa Cooper Vest, Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music (Oakland, 2021).
26 For example, jazz critic Roman Waschko traveled to the United States as the President of the Polish Jazz Federation, informing on Polish musicians and writers in exile. He was allowed to bring American records across the border, which he promptly deposited with a friend who pressed plastic duplicates. See Joanna Siedlecka, Kryptonim “Liryka”: Bezpieka wobec Literatów (Warsaw, 2008), 92–96.
27 Zdzisław Dobrowolski, “Agencja Wydwanicza “Ruch,””, in Zdzisaw Dobrowolski, Co Każdy Sprzedawca “Ruchu” Wiedzieć o Płytach Gramofonowych (Warsaw, 1966); David Crowley, “Warsaw’s Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw,” in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism (New York, 2000), 25–48.
28 Szabłowska and Krzysztof Szewczyk, Ludzkie Gadanie, 26.
29 Archive of Modern Acts, Warsaw, Culture Department, LVI-858.
30 For an analysis of how the Polish Communist Party turned to popular music as a site of economic reform, especially in the 1980s, see Raymond Patton, “The Communist Culture Industry: The Music Business in 1980s Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 2 (April 2012): 427–49.
31 On consumer goods that can be easily pressed and the bountiful nature of polyethylene, see Eli Rubin, “The Order of Substitutes: Plastic Consumer Goods in the Volkswirtschaft and Everyday Domestic Life in the GDR,” in David Crew, ed., Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford, 2003), 94.
32 Tadeusz Pszczołowski, Zaklęty dźwięk (Warsaw, 1964), n.p.
33 Stephen Coates, X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone (London, 2015).
34 Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York, 2012), 140.
35 Hubert (pseudonym), interview, Chapel Hill, USA, September 18, 2018.
36 Hillel Schwarz, Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York, 1996), 175.