January 03, 2024

X Ray Music: The Incredible History of Bone and Ribs Bootleg Records from the USSR | Frumess

58 minutes

X Ray Records is a fascinating relic from the Soviet USSR.

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Ribs (recordings)

Ribs (рёбра, translit. ryobra), also known as music on ribs (Музыка на рёбрах), jazz on bones (Джаз на костях), bones or bone music (roentgenizdat), are improvised gramophone recordings made from X-ray films. Mostly made through the 1950s and 1960s, ribs were a black market method of smuggling in and distributing music that was banned from broadcast in the Soviet Union. Banned artists included emigre musicians, such as Pyotr Leshchenko and Alexander Vertinsky, and Western artists, such as Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Ella Fitzgerald and Chubby Checker.

Production

Medical X-rays, purchased or picked out of the trash from hospitals and clinics, were used to create the recordings. The X-rays were cut into 7-inch discs and the center hole was burned into the disc with a cigarette. According to Russian music critic and rock journalist Artemy Troitsky, "grooves were cut [at 78rpm] with the help of special machines (made, they say, from old phonographs by skilled conspiratorial hands)"; he added that the "quality was awful, but the price was low, a ruble or a ruble and a half." The disks could be played five to ten times.

The clandestine approach to circulating banned popular foreign music eventually led to a law being passed in 1958 that forbade the home-production of recordings of "a criminally hooligan trend". The "hooligan trend" refers to the stilyagi (from the word stil meaning style in Russian), a Soviet youth subculture known for embracing Western styles of dress and dance.

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