Last year, Josh Baines at dance music site Thump revis­it­ed the 2004 video for “Call on Me,” a dance­floor anthem built around a high­ly rec­og­niz­able loop from Steve Winwood’s 1987 hit, “Valerie.” Draw­ing on the song’s inher­ent nos­tal­gia fac­tor, the video—which Baines calls, with­out exag­ger­a­tion, “the sex­i­est video of all time”—stages a ridicu­lous­ly lewd, sweaty aer­o­bics class, recall­ing the close asso­ci­a­tion dur­ing the 1980s fit­ness craze between sexy aer­o­bics videos and dance music, in adver­tise­ments, TV shows, MTV, movies like Hard­bod­ies and its even more ludi­crous sequel—and, of course, John Tra­vol­ta and Jamie Lee Curtis’s hilar­i­ous Per­fect, which direct­ly inspired “Call on Me.”

The “Call on Me” video is so sala­cious, in fact, that it near­ly caused then British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair to fall off his row­ing machine while watch­ing it, a scene that would fit right in to any 80s work­out sex com­e­dy. Might we imag­ine sim­i­lar scenes of mid­dle-aged Sovi­et min­is­ters and appa­ratchiks los­ing their cool while sweat­ing to Russ­ian elec­tro and watch­ing fit­ness videos like “Rhythm,” at the top? Or per­haps even the far-less-sexy morn­ing pro­gram above from 1987, with its syn­th­pop sound­track, bag­gy sweat­suits, and what look like futon mat­tress­es for exer­cise mats?

In anoth­er exam­ple of Sovi­et aer­o­bics and dance music, one must rely upon imag­i­na­tion to get the moves right. This record, Aer­o­bic Exer­cis­es by a col­lec­tion of obscure artists, was meant for more than just home work­outs, as impor­tant as they are.

The record label Melodiya—the only record label in Sovi­et Russia—and the album’s artists man­aged to get 1984’s Aer­o­bic Exer­cis­es cer­ti­fied by the “USSR Sports Com­mit­tee,” who, writes Ter­ry Matthew at 5 Mag­a­zine, “envi­sioned these records as a sort of robot replac­ing ath­let­ic train­ers.” “I don’t know if bureau­crats dream,” writes Matthew, “but if they do, I can imag­ine them envi­sion­ing a whole nation of com­rades in leg­warm­ers, rhyth­mi­cal­ly jog­ging and touch­ing their toes in time with some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing Ita­lo-sound­ing tracks of the era.”

There is a rea­son the music sounds so inter­est­ing, though some of it, Matthews admits, is “out­right putrid.” Most of the artists were well-known engi­neers and pro­duc­ers record­ing under pseu­do­nyms. These were peo­ple already work­ing in a long tra­di­tion of Sovi­et music that stretched back to Leon Theremin but also drew influ­ence from Europe and the U.S.—“a Funk move­ment in the Sovi­et Union, and one for Dis­co, and an elec­tron­ic music move­ment too, both offi­cial & above ground and under­ground and some­where in between.” Many of those artists only man­aged to get records made “through luck, through com­pro­mise and some­times through sub­terfuge.” Records like Aer­o­bic Exer­cise rep­re­sent some com­bi­na­tion of the last two cat­e­gories, “inge­nious­ly and absurd­ly” dis­guis­ing short orig­i­nal tracks as fit­ness mood music.

You’ll notice that there’s lit­tle instruc­tion on some of these tracks, and it’s in the vocal con­tri­bu­tions that much of the music’s “Ita­lo roots are exposed” notes Matthew, refer­ring to the grand tra­di­tion of most­ly non­sen­si­cal Ita­lo-dis­co, a term for a vari­ety of elec­tron­ic dance music made in Italy through­out the late 70s and 80s. These tracks “abide and gen­er­al­ly adhere to the super­fi­cial but abid­ing prin­ci­ple of Italo—that it’s less impor­tant what words mean com­pared to how they sound.” (Russ­ian speak­ers will have to con­firm this con­tention, though one doesn’t need to stretch to dis­cern the com­mands “Left, Right, Left Right!”) If some of this music sounds strik­ing­ly hip, that’s because it draws from the same Euro-dis­co well as so many con­tem­po­rary retro-elec­tro acts. (I couldn’t help but think of Mira Aroyo’s Bul­gar­i­an con­tri­bu­tions to Ladytron.)

Aer­o­bic Exer­cise was appar­ent­ly a suc­cess, such that Melodiya “launched an entire series of records in the style of the album called Sport and Music,” a four LP-col­lec­tion with much less focus and qual­i­ty con­trol. Mov­ing away from the aer­o­bics theme, the sec­ond of these albums fea­tured “some kind of com­pet­i­tive skate­board­er on the cov­er” and some “pret­ty dread­ful Hol­ly­wood Lite inci­den­tal music. By the third vol­ume, for­mer jazz musi­cians were beat­ing out 3rd rate riffs with vague­ly elec­tron­ic-sound­ing over­tones.” As with any fad, deriv­a­tive copies over sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions will always be sub­ject to seri­ous aes­thet­ic degra­da­tion. But for seri­ous fans of Sovi­et dance music, of 80s fit­ness, or, ide­al­ly, of both, Aer­o­bic Exer­cise rep­re­sents some­thing tru­ly spe­cial.

via 5 Mag­a­zine,

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sovi­ets Who Boot­legged West­ern Music on X‑Rays: Their Sto­ry Told in New Video & Audio Doc­u­men­taries

Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

How the Sovi­ets Imag­ined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futur­is­tic Draw­ings

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Pho­to via Adaman­tios at Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Back in the Mad Men hey­day of high-end home stereo, audio­philes could buy records full of sound-but-not-exact­ly-music, specif­i­cal­ly engi­neered to test the lim­its of — or sim­ply show off — their per­son­al sys­tems. Less tech­ni­cal­ly obses­sive but still proud hi-fi own­ers could drop the nee­dle on one of the albums known almost as well for the rich­ness of its sound as the artistry of its music, such as Frank Sina­tra’s In the Wee Small Hours or Charles Min­gus’ Min­gus Ah Um. The web­site, What Hi-Fi?, includes both of those 1950s land­marks on their list of twelve of the best vinyl test records, which goes on to men­tion Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light, and Radio­head­’s In Rain­bows, all worth a lis­ten no mat­ter your set­up.

But what if you lis­ten, as so many of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry do, not on vinyl through speak­ers but on dig­i­tal data inter­net-streamed through head­phones? Spo­ti­fy (whose free soft­ware you can down­load here) has assem­bled a 150-song playlist designed to give you a sense of how well those head­phones are serv­ing you, bring­ing togeth­er the work of such audio-con­scious artists as the afore­men­tioned Neil Young (a vocal crit­ic of today’s music for­mats), David Bowie, Suzanne Vega (known as “the Moth­er of the MP3”), Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd, and those con­sum­mate stu­dio genius­es Steely Dan (albeit not “Dea­con Blues,” long their audio­phile-pre­ferred stereo-test­ing song). Mixed in with the big­ger names, you’ll also hear from musi­cians less wide­ly known but no less ded­i­cat­ed to craft­ing rich and var­ied sound­scapes.

You don’t have to be Neil Young, though, to object to the very premise of the playlist, argu­ing that inter­net-streamed music, which first under­goes dig­i­ti­za­tion and com­pres­sion, can offer noth­ing but a bad­ly sub­stan­dard lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence — let alone when through a pair of head­phones, and often cheap ear­buds at that. But as all the best record­ing and mix­ing engi­neers know today, you should­n’t release an album unless you’ve first lis­tened to it close­ly through some­thing hum­bler than your ultra-high-end stu­dio mon­i­tors or fan­cy pro­fes­sion­al head­phones, mak­ing sure it sounds accept­able on every­thing all the way down to lap­top and cell­phone speak­ers. Bear in mind, a music fan who’s nev­er giv­en a thought to audio qual­i­ty might well, when they’ve test­ed their cheap ear­buds with this nev­er­the­less son­i­cal­ly scin­til­lat­ing playlist, find them­selves want­i­ng to hear not just more, but bet­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Suzanne Vega, “The Moth­er of the MP3,” Records “Tom’s Din­er” with the Edi­son Cylin­der

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.