99% Invisible - 194- Bone Music

Episode Date: December 23, 2015

In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and acquiring the scarce material to make copies of those records that did make it into the country was expensive. … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Let's go back to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. There was a terrible hunger for anything that came from West. Anything at all. Doesn't matter what. This is Alexander Jenis, Russian writer and broadcaster. For example, lighter. Can you imagine how important it was lighter? American lighter was like treasure. But a lighter is just a lighter. During the Cold War, what many Russians really craved were

expressions of creativity and art, much of which came from the West. They wanted Western music. There was of course American Western music. Western music was incredible and important. They were crazy about jazz and rock and roll. Of course, Elvis Presley. Oh, so much art and music. There's crap. You still have money. And it was extremely hard to smuggle in vinyl records that were made in the West.

And if a prized album did make it in, ordinary Russians couldn't make copies to sell or trade to their fellow comrades because vinyl, the material itself, was impossibly expensive in scarce. So we didn't have any records, it was, I didn't even see records, I think, in my life Western record, because it was dangerous. Soviet censorship was endless, but so was Russian ingenuity. That's Davy Anelsen, she and Nikki Silva are the kitchen sisters, and they produce the radiotopia podcast Fugitive Waves.

So the dissident music counterculture produced bootleg records on anything they could get their hands on. Before the tape recorders, they used X-ray film of your bones. They used used X-ray film of your bones. This is Sergey Khrushchev. And they tape on this, the music from the United States or from Europe. So it was musica nakastya, music on the bones. Music on the bone, rock on ribs, rib rock, skeleton music, bone records.

Yes, that Khrushchev. My father was Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union. From 1953 to 1964, it was beginning of all this American music then. Just twist, rock and roll, everything coming there, they didn't broadcast it from the official radio. The kitchen sisters first learned of bone music records when they interviewed Sergei Krushchev about the disnant activity taking place in

people's tiny kitchens and the new Krushchev apartments that his father had built in the 1960s. These private kitchens became the hot spots of the culture, the place to gather for the free expression of ideas. With the KGB lurking almost everywhere and nearly every phone line bugged, these individual kitchens made it possible for friends to gather privately and speak their minds. With vodka flowing and pickles and herring piled high on the tables, these dissident kitchens became unofficial lecture halls, nightclubs, art galleries, bars, dating services. The place where politics were debated for been music was played, an underground art and literature circulated. It was

amazing the lengths people went to to share unsensored culture and politics. The risks they took to see a forbidden painting read a banned book or listen to a song. Music on bones is the legal production of records on exposed X-ray film. This is Exynia Vituleva. She's a visiting professor at Columbia in the Music on bones is the legal production of records on exposed extra film. This is Exynia Vituleva, she's a visiting professor at Columbia in the Department of History and Theory of Architecture. And it was a dissident practice in the USSR, primarily during the Cold War. The first studio which produced records on the ribs was a golden dog named in tribute to nipper rca victors famous dog logo golden dog the golden dog gang

russlam baga slovskim was engineer got it idea to use old x ray buga slovskie reverse engineered a record duplication machine that a friend of his and brought from the west and put it to work. Raw vinyl plastic and other durable materials to make records was basically non-existent. So Bukus Lovsky tried to use whatever was available to scratch out copies of the records that were smuggled in. Coded paper was the most common source material on which to print copies, but those records only lasted a few plays on a turntable.

Bootlegs could only make a big impact in the black market if they were more durable than at higher fidelity. That's when he thought of using discarded X-rays. Taken from the hospital trash and magical archives in order to make a kind of phonographic recording, my copy of a Western I-Nale record. But to talk only about the ingenuity of bone records doesn't really do them justice.

They're ghostly, beautiful, haunting, transparent and just ever so slightly creepy. X-ray plates thicker than the ones we grew up with. Ribs, feet, tarsals, meta-tarsals, femurs, tumors, kidneys, all with a slight etching of circles of sounds scratched onto them. And you can see the rough edges of the craft, which reflects the level of hardship that was being overcome. These bone records came out of what Russian's called Tatiana Difitsit, total shortages of

absolutely everything. That's Oni Advan Bremsen, she's a food and culture writer. So they would take an X-ray, they would cut it, trim it the shape of a record. I'm looking on the very rough made circles of X-ray. You see how? And even the cut, because it's made with scissors. and you can see sently blues through the record you can see the X-ray of skull. It's like from Hamlet, right? These records were cut with the manicure scissors. Then with a cigarette they would burn the middle out, so you could actually play it.

These strange homemade creations were eventually put on the black market of course. It was a shadow industry like Unshining, it was a pop culture of Unshining. My brother, he got this X-ray record on the video. Love me Thunder, it was his most precious thing in his life. Валчу ромуншайник. В моих бразах, он угрозал эксорей-рекорд в Випа. Лав-митендер. Это он most precious thing in his life. Экспортный рекорд был очень, очень экспортно. Ты должны сыграть, как викли-соу. Встречу, как три батальзовутка.

И все это было, вовсом, вовсом, вовсом. Все. Они были в салоне, в салоне, в кафе, в салоне. Ты не можешь встать, что ты вебил, right? They were sold in underground cafes under the table. You can never check what you buy, right? Because it's darkly, they give you something and they promise that it is always press-legged, but you don't know, right? And you can't complain because you never meet these people again. I remember the first one I heard was Chubby Checkers.

That's Gregory Frieden, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature at Stanford. When I became a teenager myself, I used to go and shop for them. The black market was opposite the official Soviet records to a melodia. Right the center of Moscow. It was a courtyard where they were young men, long overcodes. You would walk up to them and you ask them what they had and they would open the overcrowded and say this is Chevy Checkers and this is our expressly and this is Twist. They had the whole catalog, the whole display cases on the inside of the elbow code.

It's pretty easy to look back on this practice and find it to be light, some verse of fun, but this was serious business. There was an official music patrol initiated by the KGB. To track the production of this anti-USSAR activity, punishments could be extreme. People making and buying bone records were always looking over their shoulders. In the 50s, the owners of this recording studio

got arrested for spreading Western propaganda. Moscow, UPI, a Russian vice squad, uncovered a clandestine record company recording Western style music in a vast underground studio in Leningrad. The report set official shutdown the operation, which had pressed records on the Golden Dog label for big profits. You could get three to five years for illegally copying music. The X-ray innovator himself, Ruflan Bugslowski, was sentenced to five years prison in Siberia. But cracking down on the pirates,

copying the disc wasn't the only way the state was combating the scourge of bone records. They pirated the pirates. The Soviet government attempted to flood the market of bone records by creating unplayable records in an effort to kill the demand. They would either make records that would physically mess with players, or they would include vocal recording in the middle of the music, saying things like, you like rock and roll,

you anti-soviet slime. This is chick to chick. She, how is Russian translation. You could easily identify them because they were no labels. So you say, OK, this is, you know, antrauses. Lungs, and that means Elvis, and this is, you know, Dad's. Brandt Jomer, and that means Duke Ellington. These exposed X-rays became the new form of secret and precious information.

The Western Heats recorded on the interiors of Soviet citizens. Bone Music There's a collaboration between the kitchen sisters and 99% invisible. You can hear more about bone music and the X-ray records that Jack White and Gibby Haynes made for third-man records on the Kitchen Sisters podcast that's called Fugitive Waves. Subscribe today. The Kitchen Sisters are Nikki Silva and Davie Nelson, with help from Brandy Howell, Andrew Roth, and Nathan Dalton. 99% invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery Truffman, Kurt Colstad, and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7K ALW San Francisco and produced under the offices of ArcSign, in our architecture and interiors firm, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. All of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story, including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible, you must go to 99pi.org Radio Tapio. From PRX.