Balkanton

Founded in 1952 as the state record company, Balkanton was for four decades the only label in Bulgaria, and everything happened in Sofia: masters cut, vinyl pressed and sleeves printed in the same works. Multitrack recording arrived in 1972 on English equipment and digital recording in 1982; by the middle of the 1980s the presses were turning out some nine million LPs a year, with cassettes added from 1980. The catalogue is correspondingly vast — orchestral and operatic recordings, the documented body of Bulgarian folk music, popular song, spoken theatre and poetry — and it amounts to the principal sound archive of the country's twentieth century. The company was privatised in 1999, and its work now consists largely of reissuing its own back catalogue in digital form.