Bone Music - A Collaboration With 99% Invisible The Kitchen Sisters Present podcast

Content provided by The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia and The Kitchen Sisters. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia and The Kitchen Sisters or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

The Kitchen Sisters Present »
Bone Music - A Collaboration with 99% Invisible

4d ago 20:21

MP3•Episode home

In the 1950s, some ingenious Russians, hungry for jazz, boogie woogie, rock n roll, and other music forbidden in the Soviet Union, devised a way to record banned bootlegged music on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives. The eerie, ghostly looking recordings etched on X-rays of peoples' bones and body parts, were sold illegally on the black market.

“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones—Bone Music.”

“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen. “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

And we follow the making of X-ray recordings into the 21st century with Jack White and Third Man Records in Nashville, Tennessee.

Production

Produced by Roman Mars & 99% Invisible and The Kitchen Sisters Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson. With help from Brandi Howell, Andrew Roth and Nathan Dalton. We spoke with Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita Khrushchev; Gregory “Grisha” Freidin, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature from Stanford; Alexander Genis, Russian writer and broadcaster; Xenia Vytuleva, visiting professor at Columbia University in the department of History and Theory of Architecture; Anya Von Bremzen, author of a the memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. A version of this story originally ran on NPR as part of The Kitchen Sisters’ “Hidden Kitchens” series.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX.

275 episodes

#True Stories #The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia #Society #Storytelling #Kitchen Sisters