The Atlas Listening Club | Vol. 02 July 2026 — Zeitgeist Gone Global: 1965–1975
A decade of borrowed pop — moved along physical channels, radio signals, pressing plants, cassettes, touring bands, hotel lobbies, returning students — reimagined at every stop, and looping back to close on the reason we listen at all: the answering back.
For about ten years — roughly 1965 to 1975 — Western rock, soul, funk and a new generation of mass-market keyboards reached nearly every commercial port on earth at once. And nearly every port answered back. Not with imitation, but in its own language: the Hammond organ became the new bağlama, the Fender Rhodes the new kora, the wah-wah pedal the new saung. The instrument was global; the speech was not.
Vol. 02 gathers twenty recordings from inside that window — Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Algeria, Indonesia — made by musicians who heard the same broadcast and each built something that could only have come from home. Some of these scenes were erased within the decade by war, coup or revolution. Most survive only because a cassette outlasted the people who made it, or because someone went looking decades later. A great deal of what you are hearing is, in the truest sense, a reconstruction.
We have sequenced it not by country, era or genre but as a single continuous listen — the borders dissolve on purpose. The full research piece traces how the wave actually moved: military radio, pressing plants, cassettes, touring bands, hotel lobbies and the long cargo of returning students. This is the sound of it.
The zeitgeist arrived everywhere at once. It is in the answering back that we wanted to listen.