BONE MUSIC - The History of the X-Ray Underground
BONE MUSIC is the follow up to the acclaimed X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone - the first published history of the X-Ray underground.
It contains an expanded detailed survey of the culture of the Soviet X-Ray Underground, with new testimonies from actual bootleggers and buyers, a whole section on the previously unexplored x-ray culture of Budapest, and a study of the technical means of making bone records, past and present. It has 32 pages of colour images and is heavily illustrated throughout. It is a beautiful thing.
There is also a super special Hardback: £45 Signed, limited edition version available from our UK publishers.
The limited edition Includes an exclusive risograph print of a Soviet era ‘anti-stilyagi’ poster plus a 7″ flexidisc of original 1930s Soviet-era music taken “off the bone” (super rare Hungarian jazz and a Russian forbidden emigre song).
BONE MUSIC
Stephen Coates
Original Photographs: Paul Heartfield
Strange Attractor Press / MIT
There were two types of culture… Official culture and underground culture. I was always for underground culture.” Rudy Fuchs, Bone Bootlegger
During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film.
Who were they? Why did they do it and how was it even possible? Based on years of interviews and oral testimonies, Bone Music continues the story of X-Ray Audio, presenting the stories of the original Bone bootleggers, their customers and persecutors, evoking their spirit of resistance to a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment.
Bone Music details how the bootleggers worked, outlining the technical precedents of their techniques in the work of their archivist precursors in Budapest and situating their discs in a revised history of recorded media with a wealth of compelling new detail.
Praise for X Ray Audio (Bone Music’s Predecessor)
“An archive of samizdat creativity, cultural resistance, daring entrepreneurialism.” - Sukhdev Sandhu
“Stephen Coates – strangely, an Englishman – knows more technical and biographical details of the Bone Records story than anyone else.” - Artemyi Troitsky
“One of the 25 most essential books for record collectors.” - Vinyl Factory
