Kurdish Vinyl

A curated archive of Kurdish shellac and vinyl

Kurdish Vinyl gathers Kurdish Releases, Artists, Labels, catalog numbers, and shellac and vinyl history for researchers, collectors, and visitors who want to contribute.

For more than a century, Kurdish musicians recorded their songs - on shellac, then vinyl - despite political suppression and cultural erasure in every country they lived in. Those records survive in family collections, diaspora record shops, and private archives around the world. This site gathers what can be documented: the pressings, the labels, the artists, and the context behind them.

The story of Kurdish vinyl stretches from early gramophone cylinders in Ottoman-era Constantinople (Istanbul) to diaspora pressings in Stockholm and West Berlin, with production centres in Baghdad, Tehran, and Beirut in between. It includes the dengbêj tradition, the political exile recordings of Şivan Perwer, and the labels that operated under censorship or beyond its reach.

Browse the Vinyl catalogue, explore the Labels and Artists, and read the full History to understand what these records meant and what it took to preserve them.