Stephen Coates, Aleks Kolkowski

Join The Real Tuesday Weld's Stephen Coates and sound artist Aleks Kolkowski to hear an extraordinary story of forbidden music, cold war culture and Soviet bootleg technology.

Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing strange vinyl flexi-discs when they were young. The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called ‘Bones’ or ‘Ribs’.

In the post war period, both the Soviet recording industry and its permissable musical repertoire were ruthlessly controlled by the State. But a vibrant, secret and risky trade grew up in bootleg records containing forbidden music. These were made on used X-Rays obtained from hospitals, cut into discs and engraved with the grooves of copied gramophone records.

Stephen will illustrate this incredible tale through photographs, essays, sound and film with testimonies from surviving Russians of the period.
Whilst Aleks will provide a commentary on groove-based recording techniques plus an actual live demonstration of recording onto X-Ray plates using vintage analogue record-cutting lathes - from a special live musical performance.