Bone music: the Soviet bootleg records pressed on x-rays (2015)

Over the next few days, Coates found that he had stumbled upon the postwar Soviet phenomenon of “bone music” (roentgenizdat) – bootleg recordings of music pressed on to discarded x-rays that had been banned in the USSR, lest they promote insurrectionary tendencies in listeners. Although Coates had already landed on his feet by visiting St Petersburg, where records from overseas would enter the USSR through the port and be used as masters to copy music from, he was told that he would need to meet Fuchs if he wanted to get a handle on the growth of bone music in the 1950s. Coates, who is now writing a book about bone music, echoes his point: “The last time I was in Moscow, we were interviewing a guy who used to buy these bone recordings.

Source: www.theguardian.com