The shellac and vinyl path of Kurdish recorded sound

Before vinyl: wax and shellac

Kurdish music entered the age of recorded sound earlier than is often appreciated, and at first not on vinyl at all. The microgroove LP only arrived in 1948, with the 7" 45 rpm single right behind it, while the brittle 78s that came before were shellac. So although we call the whole story “vinyl”, the Kurdish record really opens on shellac: what the late Ottoman world produced were the earliest Kurdishrecordings and the earliest commercial Kurdish discs.

In 1902 the anthropologist and archaeologist Felix von Luschan recorded Kurdish songs on wax cylinders during the Zincirli excavations near Dîlok, Northern Kurdistan; those cylinders entered the early collections of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. A year later, in Moscow, Komitas published Mélodies kurdes, not a sound recording but a landmark in writing Kurdish repertoire down and moving it between Armenian, Russian and European scholarly worlds.

The earliest documented commercial Kurdish discs came from Orfeon, the private Constantinople (Istanbul) company of the Blumenthal brothers, with a factory in Feriköy, Şişli, not from the Ottoman state. Its early-1920s general catalogue lists seven Kurdish 78 rpm discs (numbers 778–784) by Hasan Efendi and Mehmed Efendi of Amed. Even rarer Ottoman Kurdish recordings are rumoured from around 1908, but no copies or scans have yet surfaced, a reminder of how thin the surviving record is.

Through the late 1920s and 1930s, commercial Kurdish shellac expanded well beyond Constantinople (Istanbul), and its geography was startlingly transregional. In Eastern Kurdistan and Iran, discs were recorded in Tehran but manufactured in Germany: Seyyed Ali Asghar Kurdestani on Polyphon (1929), Madame Blanche on Baidaphon (1930), and Haj Khan Sadegholmolki and Mowlavizadeh Kurdestani on Parlophon (1932). After the war, Columbia, Odeon, HMV and Musical Record cut further Tehran sessions. Across these years Baghdad grew into the working centre for Kurdish recording as repression elsewhere tightened.

Iraq became decisive. HMV recorded a Kurdish series in the late 1930s (catalogue N11001–N11022) and pressed it in India; Columbia followed after the war, pressing in Britain and then, in the early 1950s, in Pakistan. The first recording company inside Iraq was Chakmakchiphon, founded by Haj Fathi Chakmakchi in Mosul in 1918 and moved to Baghdad, where its shop on Al-Rasheed Street and its studio issued roughly two hundred 78s, masters sent to Greece or Sweden to be pressed, then shipped back to be sold. Its Kurdish artists included Mihemed Arif Cizîrî and Hesen Cizîrî.

From shellac to the 45: the real vinyl era

Genuine Kurdish vinyl is a narrow, late phenomenon. In Northern Kurdistan it is almost entirely a 7" 45 rpm archive: scholarship reconstructs surviving Kurdish 45s clustering between 1961 and 1971, and one study dates the commercial breakthrough to 1965 through Constantinople (Istanbul)'s Manifaturacılar Çarşısı music trade, naming Mahmut Kizil, Ayşe Şan and Huseyin Tutal among the first to reach the market. Crucially, no Kurdish-language LP was ever pressed in Turkey, which is why so much Kurdish musical memory jumped so quickly from the 45 to the cassette.

The format mattered because it fixed a performance in a durable, tradeable object: a 7" single could cross a border, survive in a record shop, or be copied to cassette by someone who could never legally buy the disc. But vinyl was also expensive and easy for states to police. By the mid-1970s cassettes became the practical carrier, cheaper, copyable and mobile, and Şivan Perwer's album-length recordings from 1975 onward mark the shift from the two-song single to sequenced political and folk albums.

A separate vinyl-era branch ran through the Soviet Caucasus. Radio Yerevan's Kurdish service began in 1955 and went daily in 1961, building one of the century's most important Kurdish audio archives. In Soviet Georgia, Koma Wetan formed in Tbilisi in 1973, widely described as the first Kurdish rock band, and its album finally appeared through Melodiya in 1989. The Caucasus complicates the usual map: some music impossible to publish in the south could be broadcast, archived and pressed through Soviet institutions.

The dengbêj, and the women's turn into the archive

The dengbêj, the Kurdish singer-storyteller who carries epics, love songs and laments in an unaccompanied or minimally accompanied voice, was a primary subject of both fieldwork and commercial recording. The Iraq-centred shellac and radio world gathered voices from across Kurdistan: Kawîs Axa, whose songs reached disc on Baidaphon; and Mihemed Arif Cizîrî, born in Cizîr in 1912, a master of the tembûr who recorded for Kurdish radio in Baghdad and Kurdish TV in Kirkuk before dying in Duhok in 1986, and Hesen Cizîrî of the same Cizîr–Botan lineage, alongside the Armenian-born Karapetê Xaço, adopted into Kurdish musical memory.

Kurdish recorded history is not only a sequence of male dengbêjs. Meryem Xan, widely held as the first woman to record in Kurdish, opened that path on the late-1930s Iraqi series pressed by HMV in India; Ayşe Şan became the defining woman of the Turkish 45 rpm era a generation later. As Marlene Schäfers' research shows, women's cassettes and home collections later became crucial counter-archivesagainst official forgetting, many “missing” discographies survive first as memory and home copies, and only later as reissues.

Suppression and the archive gap

A record could be sung by a Kurdish artist from Cizîr, recorded in Baghdad, pressed in Pakistan or Greece, sold in Iraq, and heard in Northern Kurdistan only through radio or private copying. That geography is not an exception, it is the normal structure of Kurdish recorded history.

Suppression was never abstract; it changed the material history of the music. In Northern Kurdistan, Law 2932, enacted after the 1980 coup and repealed in 1991, explicitly banned communication in Kurdish, and records and cassettes could be seized, hidden, buried or destroyed. In Southern Kurdistan, Ba'athist policy violently suppressed Kurdish culture, especially through the Anfal campaign; in Eastern Kurdistan, Iranian authorities tightly controlled non-Persian media.

The practical effect was displacement. The most politically engaged Kurdish music was often recorded outside the region, Beirut, West Germany, Sweden, Paris, or survived only as home-copied cassettes. West Germany became a parallel infrastructure of records and tapes from the 1960s through labels such as Türküola, while the Soviet Armenian and Georgian channels preserved repertoire that was impossible to publish in Turkey. Large parts of the vinyl record of Kurdish music were never held in institutions at all; they live in family collections, diasporic record shops and on the shelves of collectors who may not yet know what they hold.

Preservation and this archive

The diaspora and a movement of vernacular archiving did the decisive preservation work. The Kurdish Institute of Paris holds one of the largest Kurdish libraries in the West, including audio; the German-Kurdish Cultural Institute digitised and published 900 songs from the Radio Yerevan archive in 2020; and newer efforts such as the Kurdish Digital Archive at Exeter show the preservation movement is still expanding. Reissue labels, KOM Müzik, Silvana, Aşanlar, brought Radio Yerevan, southern radio and older 45 rpm material back into circulation, while individual collectors scanned sleeves and digitised audio from deteriorating discs.

This archive continues that work: gathering physical release data, documenting the labels and pressing centres that issued this music, and recovering the names of the performers who appear on the records. What is catalogued here is a fraction of what was pressed, but each entry is evidence that this music existed, was sold, was played, and should be remembered.