About

Saluton! Thank you for reading my blog, on what I realise is a very niche topic. I started on this project because it was something that I would have wanted to read myself, if it already existed. As it didn’t, I had to do the research myself, and thought that I may as well write up my findings for the benefit of anyone else who is also interested.

I started learning Esperanto in about 2005, and shortly afterwards found out about Esperanto music. It’s been one of my particular interests ever since, and rarely does a week go by in which I don’t listen to at least one Esperanto album.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been particularly interested in older Esperanto music. So much of what was released in the 80s was only ever on cassette, and while most of those tapes are still playable, they won’t necessarily stay that way for much longer - and so for that reason I’ve felt more of an urgency to find those recordings, and to find out about the history and the artists behind them.

I’ve chosen to write in English rather than Esperanto in order to bring this information to a wider audience. Most of the sources I refer to are in Esperanto, and many of them are online and relatively straightforward to find in Google - so to rehash that information in Esperanto doesn’t add anything new to what’s already there. I do, however, assume that my readers have a basic understanding of common Esperanto terms, and I don’t translate the titles of albums or songs, except in cases where the meaning of the title is absolutely critical to understanding the information presented.

My main inspirations for this project include John Hoare’s excellent blog Dirty Feed, particularly his articles that take an in-depth look into how individual episodes of old TV shows were produced, and Jürgen Wulff’s Dirite Ne Signifas Farite, whose talk at a local online Esperanto group in 2022 encouraged me to finally start on this project.