Friday, May 27, 2016

Here's an interesting bit of Music History, that I had never heard about. Until today...

"The strange story of Soviet music on the bone. The iconic images of gramophone grooves cut onto x-rays of skulls, ribcages and bones have captured the collective imagination way beyond the music scene. Now for the first time, the complete story of the Soviet x-ray record has emerged, as told by the people who made it happen."

"If the images in the video above look like ghostly relics of a bygone era, that's because they are. They've been collected by Stephen Coates for his book, X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music 'On the Bone', and they were recently on display at The Horse Hospital in London.

Soviet subjects could only purchase music the government had approved. As such, only a small, carefully censored selection of classical music and traditional Slavic folk songs were available.

In Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, music lovers began risking arrest by producing their own records. They couldn't obtain proper record vinyl, but discovered they could use unwanted X-ray plates from local hospitals instead. Thus began "bone records," or roentgenizdat. Eventually, bone records could be found in black markets all over the Soviet Union."

Check out the Videos and links below...

Don

X-Ray Audio: The Documentary

Video link...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMCCYnDvpJQ

Published on Feb 11, 2016

The strange story of Soviet music on the bone.

The iconic images of gramophone grooves cut onto x-rays of skulls, ribcages and bones have captured the collective imagination way beyond the music scene. Now for the first time, the complete story of the Soviet x-ray record has emerged, as told by the people who made it happen.

Click here for more: www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-films/x-ray-audio-soviet-bootleg-records-documentary

For more information on bone music and the x-ray audio project and book, visit www.x-rayaudio.com

Credits:

The Vinyl Factory / Antique Beat production

Concept & interviews by Stephen Coates & Paul Heartfield
Filmed by Paul Heartfield
Written by Stephen Coates & Anton Spice
Producer by Anton Spice, Anoushka Seigler & Stephen Coates
Edited by Pawel Ptak

Archive footage courtesy of Russian State Archives of Film and Photo Documents