Bone Music: The Story of the Forbidden Music Made on X-ray

Not your average form of art

by Yusuf Taşkiran

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.

Despite the strict bans on music in the Soviet Union, some music fans found a way around censorship. In this forbidden period, music had a very interesting story in underground culture. Music lovers and bootleggers defiant of censorship began to compose and distribute their own records. The most interesting thing was how they made these recordings?

A skull x-ray recording

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 then cut into rough discs around 25 centimeters across, sometimes using a cigarette to burn the central hole.

Due to the absence of western music recordings in the USSR, people had to rely on recordings from the black market. They took risks to obtain these recordings, even though they knew it was a penalty for being caught with forbidden music. Copying bootleg rock and jazz records onto old x-rays was the ingenious plan of a group of people who didn’t want to give up music.

A hands x-ray recording

A rib X-ray recording

They needed a device to make these recordings. In 1946, two music lovers, Ruslan Bugaslovski and Boris Taigin, succeeded in copying the recordings. Using parts from tools such as drills and old gramophones, they built a recording machine.They used previously used X-ray

films with ribs, skull and hip bones to copy the recordings. It seemed almost impossible to imagine that people would go this far to listen to a song. Stephen Coates, who came across an X-ray recording at a market stall during his travels, makes the following definition;

A hands x-ray recording

“They are images of pain and damage overlaid with the sounds of pleasure, fragile photographs of the interiors of Soviet citizens inscribed with the music they secretly loved”

Disc recorder