Soviet "Bone Music"

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2023

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

While rifling through a stall at a flea market in Leningrad- now St Petersburg- composer and music producer Stephen Coates came across something unusual. It looked like a vinyl record, but when he held it up to the light, he noticed he could see the pattern of human bones on it. It was a bootlegged record made from an old x-ray. He dubbed his find "Bone Music" and set out to find out more about this ghostly flexi-disc, and the many others he soon found like it.

Known as "music on the ribs" in Russian due to the TB x-rays commonly used, these homemade vinyls were sold in back alleys and out of cars when music was ruthlessly controlled by the State in the Soviet Union. Not only was Western music- Rock'n'Roll, Jazz, Blues - banned but so were traditional Russian folk songs. Stephen travelled around Russia for years collecting Bone Music vinyl and interviewing the bootleggers and the buyers to find out just how dangerous and important it was to keep the music playing in the USSR.

You can find out more about Stephen's work and Bone Music here: www.x-rayaudio.com

Music heard in this episode is courtesy of Nikolai Rechetnik.

Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, welcome to Dance Know's History.
0:02.8	Fears ago, a musician, a composer, a performer was walking through the mean streets of St.
0:09.2	Petersburg.
0:10.2	It was Leningrad at the time.
0:12.0	And he came across a strange looking record.
0:14.6	He took it home, he played it, and that was the spark that ignited a passion to discover
0:20.9	the true story behind bootleg music in 1950s Russia, in the Soviet Union.
0:28.4	Stephen Kose had just stumbled across a precious historic artifact.
0:33.0	It was a piece of what he calls, Bones.
0:35.4	Forbidden music carved into human X-rays.
0:52.9	This is the story of how the Soviet Union tried to stop their people listening to their
0:57.6	traditional music, their folk songs, but also Western music, rock and roll and jazz.
1:04.4	It's a story about censorship, about dissidents, and people who love music so much, they believe
1:10.6	the streets you've got to have.
1:27.6	It's a story about the Soviet Union.
1:49.5	In my head I've got a grey image, is that unfair?
1:51.5	I don't think it is, partly because all the images we see of it are quite all grey
1:55.9	in the past.
1:56.9	But I think that in some ways it was quite a grey world.
1:59.8	Talking to Russian who were young Soviets at the time, the way they describe it is actually
2:04.1	quite grey and oppressive, for sure, culturally.
2:06.5	But of course Moscow and all these places, they were also vivid, bright, shiny swinging
	...

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