Discs made with radiographs to avoid censorship in the Soviet Union
Musical history
With jazz and rock ‘n’ roll prohibited in the communist era, a secret group developed a system to skip the veto of the Kremlin
David Ruiz Marull
Living in the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War should not be an easy task.Witch hunting, rationing, censorship, control...Even music was something that was under the surveillance of Kremlin.The most nonconformist young Russians devised, however, a formula to skip the restrictions that prevented them.
Through a youth subculture known as Styllyagi (style hunters), they began wearing much more western clothes than was used during the communist regime and ended up creating a whole secret industry to skip music censorship.And they did it using an unlikely material: medical radiographs.
The young Russians devised a formula to skip the restrictions that prevented them from listening to jazz or rock
While the Russian radios only broadcast local folk music and some songs that came from Georgia, the same place where the dictator Josef Stalin was born, these risky lovers of American music managedand 1970).The sailors were the ones who entered contraband in the Soviet Union those forbidden songs that could not be heard.
Some visionaries built homemade recording devices and copied great hits of jazz and rock.Those ‘albums’, which quickly became popular in the black market, had partial skeletal images.Hands, ribs, skulls, thoracic boxes...That is why they were known as "bones".
"No dictatorship can tolerate jazz because it represents freedom," said Dave Brubeck, the first American musician who acted behind the iron curtain.This pianist and composer traveled to Poland in 1958, five years after Stalin died and with a climate of relative opening.Jazz had been very popular (and tolerated) in the Soviet Union before World War II.But the Georgian dictator, however, despised and prohibited him.
A list made by the Soviet Ministry of Culture in 1984 shows to what extent censorship arrived.The Government recommended that "to reinforce the fight against the influence of bourgeois ideology" to be banned from B-52 for their "militarism", Blondie and Madness for their "violence", A Depeche Mode for being "apolitical"Donna Summer and Rod Stewart for "eroticism", to Culture Club for "homosexuality", to Madonna for "sex", to Michael Jackson for the "horror", by Motorhead for the "moral clumsiness", to Pink Floyd fora "perversion of Soviet foreign policy"...And that was a year before Mijaíl Gorbachev undertook the Perestroika and the Glasnost (Opening, Transparency).Imagine what happened 30 years before.
The entire official music industry was relentlessly controlled by the State.So, in 1946, Ruslan Bugaslovski was inspired by a telephone machine (designed for World War II reporters to make recordings from the battlefield) and devised a cheap formula - with pieces of tools and old gramophones - to getYour own copies.He also searched among the local hospitals to get the discarded radiographs, whose plastic was soft enough to make his rudimentary but efficient artifact could mark the songs.
“We began investigating this phenomenon ten years ago and we made constant trips to Russia.It is the story of how much music can import a person, ”explains British musician Stephen Coates, founder of X-ray Audio, the project that has been in charge of looking for these recordings.
It all started with a Coates visit to a San Petersburg market.Walking between the stops found the first of these rare specimens."Is that an album or an radiography?".It was his first approach to ‘bone music’ (Roentgenizdat) and was fascinated.
In their search they have not only found albums, but also photographs, sounds and experiences of other times.Prohibited music times, pirate technology and ingenuity when rectangular radiographs were cut with scissors to leave them round.To use them in a gramophone they needed a central hole that was often applied by applying a ignition cigarette.
Those who made this type of recordings faced barely jail if they were captured.In addition, they were satirized by the state bodies.They were called Pisaki (literally, writers or recorders, but pejoratively).
Three were the musical styles that were in this format: international rhythms such as tango or styles such as jazz played by artists such as her Fitzgerald, Russian music made by emigrants or deserters such as the Ukrainian Pyotr Leshchenko or local songs by unofficial artists like ArcadySevernyj.
Generally, the sound was quite poor.In the forties and fifty, for example, the albums sounded terrible, even when they were new.Everything depended on the recorder.As the practice extended - and the opportunity to earn money appeared - unscrupulous traffickers appeared that worsened the final product.But there was also oasis in the middle of the desert as demonstrated by a double -sided radiography - which was already very rare - with songs by Bill Haley and Elvis Presley that is currently in the hands of the Moscow collector Victor Dubiler.
The era of X -ray discs end up abruptly.Between 1963 and 1964 there was a technological advance that changed everything.The coil to coil recorders appeared and quickly took over the market because they were easy to get and cheap enough.It was no longer necessary to perform the complicated process of inserting music into radiographs because anyone could get many more songs and better quality thanks to magnetic tapes.
“(Radiographies) are images of pain, wounds, from the interior of Russian citizens, who were written with music that this same people secretly enjoyed.There is something very powerful in that, the romanticism of sharing music even though it was a painful and risky business ’,” says Stephen Coates.
