Not your average form of art
Out Of The Borders
Bone Music: The Story of the Forbidden Music Made on X-ray During the Second World War, many genres of
music were banned in the Soviet Union. Especially listening to the recordings of western musicians was seen as a crime. A large amount of music was censored by the Soviet state, including rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and forbidden Russian immigrant songs. Such music was defined as the music of the enemy. Among the banned singers were many musicians such as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Pyotr Leshchenko, the Rolling Stones and Ella Fitzgerald.
by Yusuf Taşkiran
Ribs
recordings (also known under other names such as music on ribs, bones music) were improvised gramophone records made in the Soviet Union using discarded X-ray film. The iconic images of gramophone grooves cut into x-rays of skulls, rib cages and bones have captured imagination way beyond the music scene.
With a special lathe, bootleggers were pressed
on thick radiographs found in hospital bins and Despite the strict bans on music in the Soviet then cut into rough discs around 25 centimeUnion, some music fans found a way around ters across, sometimes using a cigarette to censorship. In this forbidden period, music had burn the central hole. a very interesting story in underground culture. Due to the absence of western music recordMusic lovers and bootleggers defiant of cenings in the USSR, people had to rely on recordsorship began to compose and distribute their ings from the black market. They took risks to own records. The most interesting thing was obtain these recordings, even though they knew how they made these recordings?
A skull x-ray recording
A hands x-ray recording
29
