Soviet “hipsters” secretly shared Western music by pressing homemade records on X-rays // canavarlar

soviet record xray röntgen sovyet sscb ussr

Those who were here in the US to witness the rise of rock ‘n’ roll in the ’50s and ’60s should consider themselves lucky. My parents, who were born and raised in the Philippines, used to tell me all about the afternoons they’d spend anxiously sitting by a friend’s radio — usually one of the very few in their small, provincial towns — in hopes of hearing songs by The Beatles and Elvis Presley. These anecdotes reflect a time that seems so far removed from today, one where Western music was incredibly difficult to access if you were on the other side of the globe.

Still, it’s not just geography that’s limited people from hearing rock ‘n’ roll. For those living in the U.S.S.R. at the time, Stalin’s government had totally restricted the dissemination of Western music. But there was one group of people called “stilyagi” (or “hipsters,” as we’d call them today) who were able to effectively distribute and keep such music alive in the Soviet Union using one of the sneakiest, most inventive ways imaginable: They’d press records on disposed X-Rays, which they collected en masse from hospital dumpsters.

These homemade records, dubbed “bone music,” didn’t actually cost much to manufacture, and eventually spawned an entire network of underground distributors

http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/08/soviet-hipsters-secretly-shared-western-music-by-pressing-homemade-records-on-x-rays/