37 – Bone Music: A Collaboration with 99% Invisible

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2015

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.

“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music.”

“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen. “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

And we follow the making of X-ray recordings into the 21st century at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville TN.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters and Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible

Transcript

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1:25.0	Thanks so much. Radiotopia.
1:28.0	FM slash donate. Before the tape recorders, they want to make copy, they use this use the use x-ray film of your bones and they tape on this the music from the United States or from Europe.
1:50.0	So it was Mosika Nakashya, music on the bones.
1:55.0	Today on fugitive waves, bone music,
1:58.0	a collaboration with Roman Mars and 99% invisible.
	...

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