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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 07.3
Dead medium: Soviet "bone music" samizdat recordings
From: montfort_AT_well.com (Nick Montfort)
Source: "A Western Boyhood, in Russia," by Joseph Brodsky.
Excerpt from his essay "Spoils of War," in the recent book
ON GRIEF AND REASON. Harper's Magazine, March 1995, p34.
This was apparently just an unusual way of producing vinyl
records (themselves a dead medium), only briefly described
here. However, as this form of record reached a certain
geography that was otherwise cut off, and since bone music
had its own network of distribution and underground
production, I think it's worth mention. The comment in
parenthesis is Brodsky's.
"...in the Fifties every city youth had his own collection
of so-called bone music. 'Bone music' was a sheet of X-ray
film with a homemade copy of some jazz piece on it. The
technology of the copying process was beyond my grasp, but
I trust that it was a relatively simple procedure, since
the supply was steady and the price reasonable.
"One could purchase this somewhat moribund-looking stuff
(talk about the nuclear age!) in the same fashion as those
sepia pictures of Western movie stars: in parks, in public
toilets, in flea markets, in the then famous 'cocktail
halls'..."
nm
(((bruces adds: Artemy Troitsky's BACK IN THE USSR, a
history of the Soviet pop underground, also describes the
very extensive Soviet practice of creating and circulating
illegal recordings on used X-ray plates.)))
Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
| 04.1-06.0 | 06.1-08.0 |
08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |