OUR NEW BOOK BONE MUSIC IS SHIPPING
Our publishers Strange Attractor have made a super special signed hardback limited edition of 350 copies.
it includes an exclusive risograph print (see below) and a 7″ flexidisc of original 1930s music taken “off the bone” (Hungarian jazz and a forbidden Russian emigre song).
With original photography by Paul Heartfield and design by Tihana Spare, it looks incredible.
The soft cover version of the book is available internationally through all the usual outlets. In the US check HERE for retailers.
The book tells the secret history of the ghostly Soviet bootlegs of forbidden music cut during the cold war era and of the people who made, played and paid for them.
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 contains an expanded detailed history of the culture of the Soviet X-Ray Underground, with new testimonies from actual bootleggers and buyers, a whole section on the x-ray culture of Budapest and detailed study of the technical means of making bone records.
We’d like to acknowledge that the book would not exist without the help, knowledge and work of many people - particularly Artemyi Troitsky on the subject of the Soviet underground and Maxim Kravchinsky on the subject of forbidden Russian song. Their writings and understanding of the era provided a basis for much of the research
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
The Risograph that comes with the limited edition hardback is a print of an 'anti-social' behaviour propaganda poster: 'RADIO-active Element!’
A 'stilyagi' youth is playing rock 'n'roll loudly out the window of a communal apartment block. The poem says something like:
“Foxtrots and Tangos -
A nightclub racket without end
Here's one that nobody loves
And everyone good should condemn!”
Interestingly, this seems to reference the lines: ‘One that nobody loves and every living thing curses” from the poem ‘Demon’ (1832) by Mikhail Lermentov which would be familiar to many Russians and be a comment on the lack of culture of the intended targets,
