DJ Minimalism, Black Market Sounds, the House Revolution: Sounding Histories of Cold War Exchange

Tracing collaborations by Hardijs Lediņš (1955–2004) with Latvian, Estonian, and German colleagues, this article unfolds entwined histories of transnational exchange and technological innovation that shaped music-making practices on both sides of Cold War borders from the late 1970s through the early 2000s. It highlights commonalities between DIY or do-it-yourself cultures of music-making from Chicago and New York to Berlin and Riga, emphasising how the advent of affordable and accessible electronic instruments in the 1980s inspired a generation of creatives to produce homemade musics unlike any heard before. It continues by following paths of travel by artists across eroded borders at the turn of the 1990s, giving rise to techno culture and other phenomena while cementing, for some, ways of making music born of experiments with by-then obsolete technologies from a decade before, reminding us that transcultural exchange can both expand horizons and reveal the limits of imagined possibility.