Bone music: A creative response to state censorship

Years ago in St Petersburg, a touring musician stumbled upon a crate of LPs at a local flea market. Flicking through the selection, he found something highly unusual: one particular disc wasn’t made of ordinarily vinyl: instead, he saw a ghostly, translucent image of a broken hand.

What could easily have been dismissed as an odd souvenir led Stephen Coates to uncover what’s now labelled ‘Bone Music’: bootlegs of Western recordings, then forbidden in Soviet-era Russia, cut from found and flexible x-ray plates.

They’re really stunning to look at. Surprisingly good listening quality, too. But it is as pieces of material culture that these babies really shine. In these modest artefacts we can see so much of the time and place they were born from: the geo-political tensions, technological innovations and, ultimately, a society’s irrepressible love for the arts.

“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.”

On this website you can see examples collected by The Bureau of Lost Culture and click to hear the music on each record.