How Cold War Leningrad pressed its forbidden records into other people’s skeletons, and why every bedroom producer who has ever cut a dubplate owes the lot of them a drink.
Somewhere in a private collection there is a recording of Bill Haley spinning across a stranger’s broken ankle. Elsewhere there is jazz cut into a fractured pelvis, a tango riding a cracked rib, rock’n’roll grooved into the shadow of someone’s skull. These are real objects. You can drop a needle on them and they will play, more or less, for a while, before the sound wears thin and the music dissolves back into the X-ray it was scratched onto. Across the Soviet Union, roughly 1946 to 1964, this is how a generation got its fix. Not vinyl, not shellac, but other people’s bones.
The records were called kostnaya muzyka, music on the bone, or simply ribs. They are about as punk as recorded sound has ever been, and almost nobody in our world knows they existed, which is a small tragedy given that everyone reading this has, at some point, fetishised a one-sided white label or paid silly money for a lathe-cut twelve. We think we invented underground physical media. We did not. We were beaten to it by Soviet teenagers with a homemade cutting lathe and a contact at the local hospital’s bins.
Related
Throwback Thursday: Leftfield's Leftism and the Class of 1995
Âme release new album "Love Is The Dance”The man who dragged the story out of the archive is Stephen Coates, an English musician who used to tour Russia with his band and developed the habit, the morning after a gig, of trawling the local flea markets while everyone else nursed their hangovers. In a St Petersburg market about fifteen years ago he found a disc that looked like part record, part medical scan. The seller offered no explanation and a shrug. Coates bought it anyway, took it back to London, established that yes, it played, and then spent the next several years and a great many return trips chasing down the people who had made these things. The result is the X-Ray Audio project, a documentary made with The Vinyl Factory, a TED talk, an exhibition that landed at Moscow’s Garage Museum in 2017, and the book Bone Music, published in 2023, which now sits in shops from London to Melbourne. Not bad for a bit of waste film picked up on a Sunday.
Here is the part that the lazy version of this story always gets wrong, and it is worth pausing on, because it changes everything. The romantic telling goes: plucky Russian hipsters pirate Elvis and the Beatles to stick two fingers up at communism. Coates is blunt that this is mostly nonsense. Western music mattered, of course, jazz and rock’n’roll filtered in through wartime films and stuck to the ribs of a youth culture called the Stilyagi, basically Soviet teddy boys dressed like an American magazine they had glimpsed once and half remembered. But the bulk of what people actually cut onto bone was Russian music. Forbidden Russian music. This was not a society reaching for someone else’s culture. It was a society trying to claw back its own.
Because that is what the state had taken. By the late 1930s every art form in the USSR ran through a censor, and music was no exception. You could not simply be a singer-songwriter; to record anything legally you had to be a paid-up member of the composers’ union, vetted and approved, which is roughly as conducive to a thriving underground as it sounds. Whole rhythms were outlawed. Tango, foxtrot, mambo, all of it deemed too sensual to be helpful to young minds. The émigré stars who had fled west became non-persons, their catalogues banned along with them, including Pyotr Leshchenko, once an enormous name, the so-called King of Russian Tango. And then there was the criminal stuff, the blatnyak, the coarse, brilliant underworld ballads that had been sung in the Gulag and walked back out through the gates with the prisoners. Songs like “Murka”, a number about a gangland woman who turns informer and gets shot for it. Tales of fighting and shagging and dying, in other words, none of which advanced the values of the socialist paradise, all of which people desperately wanted to hear. State radio, meanwhile, pumped out an immaculate, sanitised, soulless version of the nation’s culture and handed it back to citizens as if it were a gift. Sound familiar? Hold that thought.
The technology arrived, as far as anyone can tell, with a single man who turned up in postwar Leningrad carrying a recording lathe, a portable contraption for cutting grooves into a blank. People copied the machine, then copied the copies, then started building their own in garden sheds, and the technique spread out across the big cities, Leningrad, Moscow, Rostov. One of the bootleggers Coates interviewed, a character called Rudy Fuchs, reportedly gave blood every week to scrape together the money for his lathe, which is a level of commitment to the cause that puts most of our crate-digging into perspective.
The choice of X-ray film was half artistry, half scavenging genius. On the technical side, the film happened to be just supple and stable enough to hold a groove, more or less. On the practical side, it was everywhere and it was free. Soviet hospitals were under orders to destroy their X-ray archives after a year, because the old film was a serious fire hazard, so you had a beautiful symmetry: the hospitals were legally obliged to get rid of the stuff, and the bonecutters wanted it. So you went round the back, knocked on the door, and swapped a bottle of vodka or a few roubles for an armful of someone’s diagnosed misfortunes. You cut the film into a rough circle with scissors, burned the centre hole with a lit cigarette, recorded a single side onto it, and sold it on a street corner for a rouble or two through a network of dealers as shifty as any I have met outside a record fair.
They were, to be clear, terrible records. One-sided, fragile, played on old gramophones with steel needles that chewed them up within a handful of spins. They were never a collection, they were a transient pleasure, here this month and gone the next, which is its own poignant thing when you consider how much of our identity we now build out of permanent, backed-up, never-deleted libraries. The sound quality was a lottery, and the visuals were pure accident, a fox-trot riding the ghost of someone’s lungs, a love song laid over a shattered hand. Coates has described them, rather beautifully, as photographs of the insides of Soviet citizens overlaid with the ghostly music they secretly loved. I cannot improve on that, so I will not try.
None of this was a hobby in the modern, low-stakes sense. If you were a punter caught with a rib, you got a telling-off and possibly a black mark on your file, the kind that quietly closes doors later in life. If you were a dealer, you were looking at prison. If you were one of the people actually making them, you were looking at prison and meaning it. Coates met a bootlegger who did two years in the 1960s, and others who served far longer, came out, went straight back to cutting, and got sent down all over again. When Stalin died in 1953 the general amnesty turned out over a million prisoners, some of whom strolled home and picked the lathe straight back up, which tells you everything about how badly people wanted this music.
My favourite detail, and the one I genuinely cannot stop thinking about, is the trap records. There is a story Coates kept hearing from different people, often enough that he suspects it might actually be true. You would buy what looked like an Ella Fitzgerald disc, get it home, drop the needle, enjoy thirty seconds of forbidden jazz, and then the music would cut out and a voice would sneer, in the words passed down through the lore, “so you thought you’d listen to some jazz did you, fucker”. Nobody is sure whether the authorities pressed these to frighten people off, or whether the bootleggers cut them as a prank on their own customers. Both theories are, frankly, magnificent. Imagine the small-hours terror of that in a state where the wrong record could ruin you. Imagine, alternatively, being the dealer who thought that one up for a laugh.
The bone era did not end in a crackdown. It ended in obsolescence, which is the way most beautiful, difficult things end. Reel-to-reel tape arrived, and it was cheaper, it sounded better, it held far more music, and, crucially, the censors had not yet decided it was illegal. The bootleg torch passed to the vast tape-sharing culture of magnitizdat, and the ribs simply stopped making sense. By around 1964 the last of them had been cut. A whole format, born of scarcity and nerve, quietly retired the moment a better option turned up. Tell that to anyone who insists vinyl never dies.
So why am I writing about Soviet medical waste in a magazine about electronic music. Because the bonecutters were us, several decades early. They were the original lathe-cut underground, the first bedroom producers, the white-label runners and the dubplate fanatics before Jamaica or Hackney got round to it. They built their own gear because the industry would not let them in, they pressed tiny runs of music the gatekeepers had banned, and they moved it hand to hand through a network that ran on trust and vodka.
Every pirate radio mast, every limited dubplate, every Bandcamp Friday, every label selling lathe cuts out of a tote bag at an all-dayer is running on the same fundamental instinct. If the official channel will not carry your culture, you build an unofficial one out of whatever is lying around.
Discover more from Decoded Magazine
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
