Bone Music - A Collaboration with 99% Invisible

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1950s, some ingenious Russians, hungry for jazz, boogie woogie, rock n roll, and other music forbidden in the Soviet Union, devised a way to record banned bootlegged music on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives. The eerie, ghostly looking recordings etched on X-rays of peoples' bones and body parts, were sold illegally on the black market.

“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 with Jack White and Third Man Records in Nashville, Tennessee.

Production

Produced by Roman Mars & 99% Invisible and The Kitchen Sisters Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson. With help from Brandi Howell, Andrew Roth and Nathan Dalton. We spoke with Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita Khrushchev; Gregory “Grisha” Freidin, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature from Stanford; Alexander Genis, Russian writer and broadcaster; Xenia Vytuleva, visiting professor at Columbia University in the department of History and Theory of Architecture; Anya Von Bremzen, author of a the memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. A version of this story originally ran on NPR as part of The Kitchen Sisters’ “Hidden Kitchens” series.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Radiotopia. Welcome to The Kitchen Sisters present.
0:04.0	From PRX. We're the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson, and Nikki Silva.
0:10.2	Hey, it's Christopher Kimball from Mill Street Radio. Sounds like I'm bragging, and I am,
0:14.7	we're the number one most downloaded food podcast in America. You know, Melstereo Radio travels
0:19.5	the world in search of the very best food
0:21.9	stories. You'll hear about smuggling eels on the black market, the secret intelligence of plants,
0:28.0	and insider tips to eating in Paris. In every week, listeners call in with our toughest culinary
0:32.6	mysteries. Discover a world of food stories by searching your podcast app for Mill Street Radio.
0:43.3	Before the tape recorders, if they want to make copy, they used this used X-ray film of your bones,
0:52.9	and they tape on this the music from the United States or from Europe.
0:57.0	So it was music on the bones.
1:02.0	Today, the Kitchen Sisters present bone music, a collaboration with Roman Mars and 99% Invisible.
1:10.0	And we follow the making of x-ray recordings into the 21st century at Third Man Records in Nashville.
1:21.1	In the decades following the Russian Revolution, millions in Moscow live crammed together in newly created communal apartments.
1:29.3	The spaces were crowded, one kitchen for the dozens who live there now.
1:35.4	Joseph Stalin, his death March 5, 1953, marked the end of a long page in Soviet history.
1:42.1	In the late 1950s, when Khrushchev emerged as the leader after Stalin's death,
1:47.0	one of the first things he addressed was the housing shortage and the need for more food.
1:52.0	The Soviet government began construction of hundreds of huge standardized apartment buildings
1:58.0	called Khrushchevkas, with individual family apartments
2:02.2	to replace the communal living quarters.
2:05.1	In a country, with little or no place to gather for the free expression of ideas, the
	...

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