What is 'Music on the Bones'?

Great film piece by Russian correspondent Alex Kan on the project on BBC NEWS today. It was shot at The Horse Hospital in London inside out exhibition and on the day of an an amazing live event when we recorded thereminist Lydia Kavina  to x-ray.

 

X-RAY AUDIO ON BBC RUSSIA

BBC Russia made a short video piece on our live event at The Horse Hospital with thereminist Lydia Kavina last week.

 It translates:

"In London, they are listening to  the sound of "music on the bones”

Today we can easily download thousands of songs to our phones and iPods without thinking about the process of recording and playback. But a little more than half a century ago in the Soviet Union, fans of forbidden music - jazz, rock and roll and emigre  songs - had to resort to almost unbelievable means - they recorded music onto the surface of X-rays.

Thus was born the unique socio-cultural phenomenon, known as "Music on the bones", "rock on the edges" or "roentgenizdat."

In Russia, this story is almost completely forgotten. In the West, nobody knew about it. Until now when a few British enthusiasts, accidentally came across "music on the bones,” have engaged in a deep and serious study of this phenomenon.

They not only hold exhibitions, publish books and are preparing to release a documentary, but they have revived the process of recording and playback of music on X-ray film.

Alexander Kan, columnist of the Russian Service for Cultural Affairs visited the London exhibition of the project"

You can watch it HERE

X-RAY AUDIO live with thereminist LYDIA KAVINA

In a very special live event on Dec 11th at London's The Horse Hospital, we will be previewing the X-Ray Audio film. The full documentary features interviews with Russian bone bootleggers and buyers, archive footage and various commentators.

Following the screening, we will be joined  LYDIA KAVINA, thereminist extraordinaire, to provide a live demonstration of recording onto X-Ray plates using vintage analogue record-cutting lathes and a commentary on groove-based recording techniques on plastic.

Lydia is the grand niece of Lev Theremin and generally regarded as one of the best therminists in the world.  She will be accompanied by pianist Edmund Davie.

For tickets and more information go HERE

X-Ray Audio at DJ Food's Flexibition

Vinyl junkie, collector, designer and cut up expert DJ Food (aka Strictly Kev) has an extraordinary blog site devoted to flexi discs.  It features items from his amazing collection and feature on the history and culture of flexis. This month's post is by X-Ray Audio on the Soviet Bone Flexis.  

You can check it out, and a whole weird and wonderful world of vinyl wonkiness, HERE 

DJ Food will be with us on December 5th for a special live event 'A Night at the Flexibition' playing and talking lexis during the X-Ray Exhibition at The Horse Hospital. 

See HERE for more details.

Check out DJ Food on his unparalleled collection of flexi discs.

X-Ray Audio at Vivid Projects

Next week we head up to Birmingham for a two week residency at Vivid Projects as part of the 'This Mortal Coil' season. The exhibition has been expanded substantially with images, sound and film.

The private view is on November 6th and Stephen and Aleks will be hosting a live event on November 13th with live x-ray cutting from a performance by a local musician.

For details go HERE

X-Ray Audio in Russian Beyond the Headlines

In an article 'Boogie bones: Underground Soviet X-ray LPs come to UK' journalist Aliide Naylor tells:

"Two British musicians are recreating the underground Soviet practice of ‘pressing’ music onto x-rays, delving into its history while demonstrating the process in cities around the world. November will see the pair stage shows at two UK Rough Trade stores, as well as at Birmingham’s Vivid Arts media lab.

Stephen Coates, photographer Paul Heartfield and musician and vintage recording specialist Aleks Kolkowski have a passion for authentic Soviet sounds.

 

Later this year, Coates plans to release a book via Strange Attractor Press and an album with a twist: A collection of his own songs, each one printed on an x-ray of a different body part (made the same way as a vinyl record), which will together compose a whole human skeleton.

Traditionally a marauder’s symbol, skull-and-bones images lend themselves to this unique form of music piracy. The idea emerged in the repressive atmosphere of the Soviet Union, where enthusiasts traded banned and rare genres recorded onto x-ray plates. Censorship fostered an unofficial culture, where writers, artists and musicians forged channels to distribute their own and forbidden foreign music, mostly rock and roll and jazz.

While censored literature was easily reproduced by hand – ‘samizdat’ – music posed a greater challenge. The use of roughly cut x-rays – ‘roentgenizdat’ – peaked in the 1940s and '50s, before technological developments in the post-Stalinist period gave rise to new and better mediums. There was another reason too: by 1958, roentgenizdat had been made illegal in Russia, resulting in distribution networks being broken up and offenders imprisoned."

For the rest of the article go HERE

 

X-RAY AUDIO @ VINYL FACTORY

Vinyl Factory have run a piece on our upcoming performance at the East End Film Festival on July 3rd.

Russian Art and Culture also ran this piece

As well as being the UK's premier producer of new vinyl records, Vinyl Factory do amazing work and collaborations -  most recently with artist Christian Marclay at White Cube.

We will be collaborating with them on the upcoming X-Ray Audio documentary later in the year.

For tickets to the event next week go HERE

 

X-RAY AUDIO - The Book

We are very pleased to announce the publication of the book "X-RAY AUDIO - The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone"  by Strange Attractor Press.

Strange Attractor have an extraordinary legacy of publishing books on fringe science and culture and are the perfect partner for the X-Ray Audio project.  Edited by Stephen Coates, the book is a lavish production filled with wonderful images of Bone records taken by photographer Paul Heartfield and featuring interviews with pre-eminent Russian music journalist Artyemi Troitsky, bone bootlegger Rudy Fuchs, bone buyer Kolya Vasin and early recording expert Aleks Kolkowski with an essay on the history of forbidden Soviet song by writer Maksim Kravchinsky and a foreword by Sukhdev Sandhu.

The book is available to pre-order now with a special pre-order limited edition containing an X-Ray flexi of Bone music by original bootlegger and poet Boris Taigin.

Go HERE for more details

The Publication is supported by Arts Council England

TEDx (Ray) Krakow

Stephen presented the story of X-Ray Audio at this year's TEDx conference in Krakow on Saturday, June 13, 2015 to a very enthusiastic audience. 

You can wtach below

X-RAY AUDIO - review on VICE

Following our events, in New York last week, VICE have run a long piece on the project by Kim Kelly. The events were amazing. Sukdhev Sandhu of New York University invited us to speak at  his Colloquium of Unpopular Culture.  It was great and strangely appropriate to be in a physics laboratory with slightly cold war feel to it.  A lot of Russians came and we recorded a live performance by New York based Russian jazz singer Svetlana Shmulyian.  Svetlana sang a song by 'Eddie' Rosner - very appropriate as Rosner was one of the prominent Jazz musicians who was arrested and imprisoned during the  post war Soviet era (although we have yet to come across his music on x-ray).

We followed up with an evening at the extraordinary Museum of Morbid Anatomy in Brooklyn. We were joined by our friend Marcella Puppini to sing the old Russian song Dorrogoi Dlinnoyou which Aleks recorded straight to x-ray.

Thanks to our hosts and to all the people who came. It is so rewarding to realise how much this story connects with people.

The VICE piece is HERE

X-RAY AUDIO - In The Moscow Times

Rather strange, though very nice, to have the X-Ray Audio Project featured in The Moscow Times last week.  Seemed a bit cheeky in a way to have a piece in a Russian newspaper about a British project on Russian culture.. The piece was written by veteran Russian music journalist Sergey Chernov.  We are hoping it might provoke Russians who read it or hear about it, to get in touch with stories about Music on the Bone.

We are grateful to Sergey Chernov because apart from authoring the article he helped us several times in St Petersburg to meet people and make various interviews for the project and book.

The Article is HERE

X-RAY AUDIO @ NYU Wednesday 6th May

THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE PRESENTSX-RAY AUDIO: A STORY OF FORBIDDEN MUSIC, COLD WAR CULTURE AND SOVIET BOOTLEG TECHNOLOGY

Aleks and Stephen will be presenting the project with a live demonstration of cutting to x-ray at New York University on May 6th and will be joined for a very special performance by Russian singer SVETLANA SHMULYIAN

The event is FREE

For more details go HERE

 

Morbid Anatomy

We are very much looking forward to being at the Museum of Morbid Anatomy in Brooklyn next week,  It is a avery appropriate venue for X-Ray Audio. The director Joanna Ebenstein is a friend and she does incredible work. If you don't know about it already, do check it out

Stephen wrote this month's guest post on X-Ray Audio in the Morbid Anatomy blog

The event at the museum with Stephen and Aleks is HERE.  We have just had news they will be joined by a VERY special guest from whom an x-ray record will be cut live..

Bones Baltic BBC

The exhibition at THE BALTIC CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS (see below) is a fabulous tribute to crazy vinyl culture. The X-Ray Audio section is very nicely sited adjacent to an amazing film piece by Christian Marclay which shows a gramophone needle riding the grooves of a record in huge close up.

On 16th APRIL, Stephen and Aleks Kolkowski will be presenting an evening on the project with a talk, images, film and a demonstration of the cutting of a new X-Ray record.

Paul Smith vocalist of the band MAXIMO PARK has graciously submitted himself to be x-rayed this time.  He will be performing a song form his new album live and Aleks will be cutting it straight to x-ray . 

TICKETS HERE

BBC ARTS covered the exhibition with a film featuring the X-Ray Audio installation and an interview with curator Alessandro Vincentelli.  (Although the x-ray bootlegs were not imported into the Soviet Union as stated, they were made there and the use of X-rays was not an attempt to disguise the true nature of the records). 

The Curves of the Needle at The Baltic

The X-Ray Audio Project will be heading up to Gateshead next month for the next exhibition at THE BALTIC CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS

Stephen Coates and Paul Heartfield have curated a selection of Soviet X-Ray bootlegs plus associate images and ephemera for "The Curves of the Needle' show:

3 APRIL 2015 - 17 MAY 2015

"The Curves of the Needle considers a recurring interest in the vinyl record by artists. This group exhibition explores album artwork, the cultural significance of the record collection and brings together contemporary artists who have experimented with the format, including; David Blandy, Sam Belinfante, Graham Dolphin, Rhodri Davies, Zoviet France, Bruce Haack, Sun Ra, Dj78, Jonathan Monk, Elizabeth Price, Philip Jeck/Lol Sargent, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, X Ray Audio Project, Christian Marclay, alt.vinyl, Jim Lambie, and Michael Wilkinson."

On 16th APRIL, Stephen and Aleks Kolkowski will be presenting an evening on the project with a talk, images, film and a live demonstration of cutting a new X-Ray record from audio

For more upcoming events go HERE

For the Vinyl Factory's post on the exhibition go HERE

X-Ray Audio in The Guardian

An extensive and detailed piece on the project by Pete Paphides was published in The Guardian today.  It is called 'BONE MUSIC' and offers an insight into importance of format in the way we perceive recorded music as well as great words on our exhibition at The Horse Hospital.

There are wise words from Aleks Kolkowski and more about his work in cutting music onto repurposed cds as well as X-Rays.

You can read it HERE

X-Ray Audio: Bones and the BBC

The X-Ray Audio Exhibition has enjoyed a lot of media attention in the last weeks. Stephen was on BBC Radio 4's TODAY program talking about it with Sarah Montague and the Russian journalist Victoria Bazoeva.

You can check it out HERE 

That  piece made it to Pick of the Week on Sunday: the weekly round up of the best programming from the previous seven day

BBC Ukraine ran a piece with some of the music that Stephen has composed for the project and which Aleks cut onto X-Ray

And last weekend BBC WORLD ran a very nice piece called 'Bone Music' by producer Natalia Rolleston with Stephen and Aleks Kolkowski which almost sounds like a trailer for our upcoming documentary.

Have a listen

Extra Live Date at The Horse Hospital Added

Next Wednesday's Live event sold out so fast, that we have added an additional date at The Horse Hospital  on Friday 30th January.  Tickets are HERE

Stephen and Aleks will be telling the strange history story of the X-Ray Bootlegs and will be providing a live demonstration of recording onto used X-Ray plates using vintage analogue record-cutting lathes. This time, uniquely they will be cutting X-Rays from an actual live musical performance by special guest  Marcella Puppini

More Details HERE

The live events take place inside our exhibition at London's Horse Hospital which runs until January 31st.  There is a selection of original beautiful and spooky forbidden x-ray bootlegs collected in Russia over the last few years plus film, images, associated ephemera and a miscellany of strange objects

X-Ray Audio: Soviet Bootlegs Exhibition and Live Event

STEPHEN COATES and PAUL HEARTFIELD will be holding an exhibition of Soviet X-Ray Bootlegs, film , images, associated ephemera and miscellany at London's Horse Hospital from January 21st - 31st.  They will present a selection of  these beautiful and spooky forbidden records collected in Russia over the last few years.

And Stephen and sound artist ALEKS KOLKOWSKI will be repeating October's sold out presentation of the story of the X-Ray bootlegs on Wednesday 28th January.  Aleks will provide a commentary on groove-based recording techniques on plastic and they will be providing another  live demonstration of recording onto used X-Ray plates using vintage analogue record-cutting lathes.

This time, uniquely they will be cutting X-Rays from an actual live musical performance.

More details HERE 

EXHIBITION: Wednesday 21st - Sat 31st January 12 – 6pm (except Sundays)

PRIVATE VIEW: Tuesday January 20th  7pm

LIVE EVENT: Wednesday 28th January 7pm