Russian synthwave, in the Frekvenci archive, is mostly not the classic sound. Of 529 listed releases by 125 artists with Russia on file, 219 are vaporwave-family, 133 synthwave and 90 darksynth. Sovietwave, the style built on nostalgia for Soviet-era electronic music, is part of the picture but a small one in the tags: 12 releases carry it.
Sovietwave: a mood more than a sound
Bandcamp Daily's guide dates sovietwave to the early 2010s, when interest in the USSR's approach to electronic music grew into a new subgenre.[1] It calls the style "arguably more a mood than a musical style", and quotes one of the founders of an online community for the genre as saying it is dreamy electronic music inspired by Soviet culture, with a vague outline.[1] The guide's examples are a mix of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg names and labels.[1]
A Jacobin piece, republished by The Wire in 2022, makes two points worth keeping. Sovietwave is a contemporary scene that grew online, not a revival of 1980s Soviet records, and Eduard Artemyev and the band Kino are better seen as precursors than as members.[4] Wikipedia places the genre in the post-Soviet states and treats it as a subgenre of synthwave, a classification you may or may not accept.[2] Our What is sovietwave? Space-age nostalgia from the former USSR goes further.
For this page, the useful point is how little of the Russian catalogue wears the tag. What the archive shows is a broader scene that works in vaporwave, darksynth and synthwave, often at once.
Two peaks, a few busy hands
Russia makes up about 3.7% of the releases with a country attached, from 96 labels, and 115 of the 529 releases are self-released. Because artist country is missing for about two in five releases overall, and several of the busiest Russian entries have no linkable page, treat every count as a minimum.
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2012 | 1 |
| 2013 | 8 |
| 2014 | 10 |
| 2015 | 38 |
| 2016 | 37 |
| 2017 | 58 |
| 2018 | 108 |
| 2019 | 64 |
| 2020 | 86 |
| 2021 | 54 |
| 2022 | 34 |
| 2023 | 16 |
| 2024 | 6 |
| 2025 | 8 |
- The climb is 2015: from 10 releases to 38 in a year.
- 2018 is the peak with 108, and 2020 is a second high at 86.
- A steep fall after. 54 in 2021, 34 in 2022, 16 in 2023, then 6 in 2024 and 8 in 2025.
Those two highs are shaped by a few busy hands. from tokyo to honolulu has 27 listings in 2018, and the second-largest Russian entry in the data, an artist filed under the symbol ▥, has 48 releases, all self-released, with 25 in 2018 and 16 in 2020. Together the two account for 52 of the 108 in 2018. Part of the fall is catalogue lag, since databases fill recent years slowly. But the drop starts in 2021, and the archive cannot tell us why, so we do not guess. Treat 2022 onward as thinly covered.
Cities on file: St. Petersburg has 20 artists and Moscow 17, then Yekaterinburg with 4. A further 56 give only "Russia".
Dark, dreamy and online
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Family | Releases |
|---|---|
| Vaporwave | 10,473 |
| Synthwave | 8,105 |
| Popwave | 2,678 |
| Darksynth | 1,803 |
| Dreamwave | 833 |
| Cyberpunk | 6 |
The family split is 219 vaporwave, 133 synthwave, 90 darksynth, 57 popwave and 30 dreamwave. Tags give the texture: 125 synthwave, 73 darkwave, 72 vaporwave, 53 dreampunk and 46 future funk. Dreampunk is a vaporwave-adjacent tag, and darkwave is the second most common tag after synthwave. Bandcamp Daily's map of vaporwave lists ten branches from eccojams to hardvapour, and our tag counts show which ones turn up under Russian names.[3] If you want to pick up the dreamier thread, What is dreampunk? Vaporwave's dark, cinematic dream and What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music are the starting points; for the darker half, What is darksynth? The heavy, horror-lit side of synthwave.
Who releases the most
By listed releases: From Tokyo to Honolulu (57), the ▥ entry (48), Desired (40), Starfounder (38), Acryl Madness (23), International Telecom (18), 3FORCE (17), Cutoff:Sky (15) and 0Kontrol (12). The timing says something: Desired has 16 listings in 2015 and 11 in 2016, so it was one of the reasons for the first climb, while International Telecom has 9 in 2022, one of the few busy years late in the curve.
The leading label for Russian releases is Neon Retro Records, with 34 of its 66 listings. Then Electric Dream Records (19 of 30), Global Pattern (15 of 78), Hjördis-Britt Åström (15 of 16), FiXT Neon (9 of 113) and Synthwave Radio (6 of 18). The counts are by artist country. Many Russian acts also appear on labels abroad, such as Future City Records, where Blut's Own Pure is listed.
Records to start with
Nine records from 2009 to 2025, picked to cover the early synthwave names, the dreampunk side and the recent labels, one per act.
- Tesla Boy · 2009 · Mullet Records · EPA 2009 EP, the earliest Russian release on file.
- Kotovsky86 · 2020 · Neon Retro Records · LPA 2020 synthwave album on Neon Retro Records.
- Acryl Madness · 2023 · Neon Media Team · LPA 2023 synthwave album on Neon Media Team.
- Lost Engineer · 2023 · Retrowave Touch Records · LPA 2023 spacesynth album on Retrowave Touch Records.
To hear the dark side of the scene, tune the Dark station (94.6 FM). Another Eastern European scene, with a completely different size and shape, is in Synthwave from Hungary: Budapest's small, busy scene, and the genre's broader outline is in What is synthwave? A plain guide, with the numbers.
Sources
- A Guide to Sovietwave · Bandcamp Daily, Ana Leorne, 16 Nov 2020
- Sovietwave (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Soviet Nostalgia Now Has Its Own Soundtrack · Jacobin, Dean Van Nguyen, republished by The Wire, 21 Feb 2022