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Bone Music

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Garage Assistant Curator Ekaterina Lazareva speaks to Stephen Coates from the X-RAY AUDIO project about the exhibition Bone Music at Garage.
Ekaterina Lazareva: How was the X-RAY AUDIO project initiated and developed?
Stephen Coates: It began in 2012, when I was performing in St. Petersburg. During a visit to a flea market I found a strange object that seemed to be both an x-ray and a record. I thought it was ghostly and beautiful. I decided to try to find out its story and eventually that led me to meet an old Russian man called Rudy Fuchs. Rudy was one of the people who made these records in St. Petersburg in the 1950s. After more research and finding more records and meeting more people, we decided to make an archive of images and sounds from the records. And then we made a small exhibition in London with a live event where I told the story of the records and the people who made them as I understood it. The exhibition has now been held twice in London, in Birmingham, Newcastle, in Northern Ireland and in Trieste in Italy. And we made live events in Krakow, Copenhagen, Berlin, New York, and several other places.
EL: Will the exhibition at Garage present something new?
SC: Actually, it is mostly new. We are showing new examples of discs and new films and interviews. And at Garage we have brought the accidental secret aesthetic of the records to the surface. These things that were originally forbidden, a part of street-culture, and disposable objects will be presented as beautiful, high-culture artefacts. We&rsquo;re also planning live events, including a musical performance, a round table discussion, and film screenings.
EL: As a musician, do you feel nostalgia for a time when music was so important?
SC: One song might have felt very valuable as you would have to work hard to find it. And the fact that some of this music was ideologically forbidden also made it more precious. Today, we live in a time when music is completely abundant, generally nothing is censored, you can get anything anytime you want it&mdash;and for no money if you don&rsquo;t want to pay. That is very different to the time and culture in which these records were made. Perhaps the value of one song now can never be as high as it was in 1949 in Leningrad. I think for all of us this is a question worth thinking about: what is music worth now and what would I lose if it was taken away?
EL: Do you think that forbidden music was a Cold War weapon of subversion that somehow led to the fall of the Soviet Union?
SC: I don&rsquo;t know how great an effect music had in bringing about change, but it played an important part. When you talk to people from that era and from the time of perestroika, they say how much music mattered to them and how cultural restrictions made them angry and passionate about change. This story is not only about the Cold War and censorship, it is also a story about human ingenuity and creativity, and about people being prepared to risk punishment for the sake of something they love. That&rsquo;s a lot of things combined in a piece of plastic!

Garage Assistant Curator Ekaterina Lazareva in conversation with Stephen Coates

In this extract from his book X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone musician Stephen Coates tells the fascinating story of the x-ray discs which make up the exhibition Bone Music.
Many older people in Russia remember seeing or hearing strange, vinyl type flexi-discs when they were young. They were called &ldquo;bones&rdquo; or &ldquo;ribs&rdquo; and contained music forbidden by the Soviet censor. They originated in the period 1946 to 1964, when the sound of such music became completely associated with images of the human skeleton. For, in a time when the recording industry was controlled by the state, music lovers and bootleggers discovered an extraordinary alternative means of reproduction: they learned to re-purpose used x-ray film as the base for making their own records.
This is a story in which so many things intersect: cold war history, vinyl culture, recycling, recording technology, censorship, human ingenuity and, of course, music. These discs were analogue recordings produced laboriously one by one in real time: each one looked and sounded different to all the others, and each one represented a risk to those who made, traded, and played them.
They are roentgenizdat, private x-ray publications. They can be grouped within a family of dissident Soviet cultural activity that includes the samizdat private publication of forbidden literature, the tamizdat smuggling of literature abroad for publication, the magnetizdat sharing of music via reel-to-reel tape recorders and, in the 1920s and 1930s, the private copying and circulation of forbidden songs on sheet music.
It is impossible to piece together a neat overview to explain the long and labyrinthine history of musical prohibition in the Soviet Union. In the early years of the revolution, experimentation was encouraged in the search for an appropriate soundtrack for the new society. Developments in electronic music were way in advance of those in the West. But as the cultural censor took hold, songs, artists, and styles came in and out of official sanction with bewildering frequency. Composers such as Shostakovich could be lauded and then condemned, though he still managed to incorporate forbidden styles within film scores by presenting them as parodies or having them performed by the bad guys. Once-famous and hugely popular artists like Vadim Kozin fell from grace, were imprisoned, and might be allowed to perform privately, but not to record. Quotas for permissible non-Russian or dance music to be played on the radio were issued and revised. Certain American films and music were allowed, for a while at least. Bona-fide Western jazz gramophone records were sometimes sold in official stores or played on the radio, but confiscated at other times.
<blockquote>The x-ray bootlegs are skin-thin slivers of do-it-yourself punk protest compressed with deep layers of time, oppression, culture, and hope.</blockquote>
It is difficult to avoid forming the opinion that what was allowed was just whatever Stalin, Zhdanov, and those in charge liked. And as we know, dictators generally like things big and like things simple. They don&rsquo;t like jazz.
So jazz is one of the styles that appeared on x-ray records. Jazzy, Latin rhythms like the foxtrot, the samba, the rumba, and the tango were prohibited and often appear on bones, even though they don&rsquo;t seem particularly counterrevolutionary. The rock &lsquo;n&rsquo; roll that followed jazz in the West was, of course, also prohibited. But it was wildly popular amongst bootleg buyers. Bill Haley&rsquo;s &ldquo;Rock around the Clock&rdquo; achieved almost mythical status. Its lyric of &ldquo;One, two, three o&rsquo;clock, four o&rsquo;clock rock&rdquo; could hardly be described as anti-Soviet, or anti-anything, but the song&rsquo;s instruction to ignore everything in favor of non-stop dancing would have irritated the authorities as much as it delighted young listeners.
The x-ray bootlegs are palimpsests: objects made for one purpose but reused for another. They are skin-thin slivers of do-it-yourself punk protest compressed with deep layers of time, oppression, culture, and hope. These records were made in a time when music mattered so much that people were prepared to go to prison for it. Of course, there are places in the world where music and culture are still censored&mdash;in communist North Korea, in some Islamic countries&mdash;and it is not so long ago that musicians were targeted by death squads, but we live in a time when music offers no risk, no danger. What does that make it now worth?

ROENTGENIZDAT

Restrictions on the arts imposed by the Soviet censor created a culture where much popular music was becoming either impossible to buy or completely forbidden.
By the 1940s, this included Western jazz and rock &lsquo;n&rsquo; roll; music made by Russian &eacute;migr&eacute;s; Russian so-called &ldquo;prison&rdquo; songs; entire genres like mambo and even the repertoire of official Soviet stars like Vadim Kozin, which became forbidden after his imprisonment on charges of homosexuality. Much of this music had been very popular or was what young people wanted to hear. That frustrated desire and the high cost of smuggled records encouraged bootleggers to satisfy the demand using home-made machines and x-ray ﬁlm.
The bone records they made were almost always single-sided, recorded individually at 78 rpm, with a duration of about three minutes. Each was different to the others. The quality was often poor and the discs would wear out quickly, but they were sold cheaply and secretly on the street.
<iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339990224&amp;color=30bfb3&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true" width="100%" height="450" frameborder="no" scrolling="no"></iframe>
&nbsp;

X-ray Records 1946–1964

Bone Music is an exhibition examining a unique episode in postwar Soviet history. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, inventive Soviet music lovers made illegal copies of banned music on used X-ray film.
Stephen Coates is a composer and music producer.&nbsp;A graduate of the Royal College of&nbsp;Art, he is particularly interested in the interaction between music and culture. In 2010, Stephen wrote and presented an eight-part radio documentary series for Resonance FM (London), "Sounds of propaganda and the&nbsp;Cold War,"&nbsp;investigating the way music and audio was used for political purposes in the West and in the Soviet bloc. He&nbsp;came across the subject of the x-ray&nbsp;recordings when travelling to&nbsp;Russia to perform over the last six years.
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Online tour around Bone Music with the exhibition's curator Stephen Coates

Rock journalist and music critic Artemy Troitsky giving a tour around Bone Music exhibition at Garage.
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Online tour around Bone Music with Artemy Troitsky

Read the interview <a href="//garagemca.org/ru/materials/1472?id=71">in Russian</a>.&nbsp;
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Online tour around Bone Music with Artemy Troitsky

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