At TED in Krakow in June 2015, Stephen Coates presented the X-Ray Audio project, telling the story of the Soviet bootleggers and asking e questions: "What would you risk to listen to music?"

Earlier this year, we curated an exhibition with Sony Music in Tokyo. As part of the show we held various live events. At the studios of Dommune TV, the crazy and quite wonderful Open Reel Ensemble joined us for a live broadcast. Here is leader Ei Wada performing with an office fan. Yes, you read that right, with an office fan - which we recorded onto x-ray film and played back.

Live x-ray recording in Brussels at the European House of History

ROENTGENIZDAT - 'The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone' .

Trailer for the award winning documentary by Stephen Coates and Paul Heartfield

ROENTGENIZDAT - 'The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone'

An award winning documentary by Stephen Coates and Paul Heartfield

"Leningrad 1946, the Cold War: All culture is subject to the brutal control of a totalitarian state censor. But music-mad bootleggers devise an incredible and risky way to listen to and share the music they love, copying forbidden songs onto used X-ray film and creating their own records.."

Featuring nterviews with Soviet era x-ray bootleggers, commentators and archive footage telling the story of one of the strangest eras in vinyl, music, forbidden culture and cold war history.

In August 2019, we performed at the WOMAD festival with Imperial War Museum as part of their Culture Under Attack season. We worked with the musician and activist artist EMMANUEL JAL and his sister NYARUCH They had previously told their harrowing stories - Emmanuel was a boy soldier in Sudan in unbelievably terrifying conditions. We then cut them singing together to x-ray. Film by Matthew Norman courtesy of Imperial War Museum

In an historic X-Ray Audio event at London's The Horse Hospital, we made new x-ray records form pa performance by Lydia Kavina of the Theremin family and probably the best thereminist in the world to 

Here is a film clip of an original recording lathe used by bootlegger Rudy Fuchs to make Bone records on X-Ray plates in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  

X-Ray Audio Documentary made with Vinyl Factory

Live x-ray recording at The Horse Hospial in London

London Film maker Michal Dzierza has made this super short about the project shot in London's The Horse Hospital inside the X-Ray Audio exhibition we held there in January.

In January 2015 during the X-Ray Audio exhibition at London's The Horse Hospital, we cut a new x-ray record from a live performance of an old Russian song