Next Friday (July 3rd) at a unique event for the East End Film Festival, an extraordinary story of Cold War culture and bootleg technology will be told.
Over the last few years, we have become accustomed to complete sonic abundance haven't we? We see it as our right. And one of the amazing things about that is that already it doesn't seem.. amazing. It is just the way things are, and soon we will have forgotten any other possibility. But the X-Ray audio project (www.x-rayaudio.squarespace.com) is about another possibility, about another time when things were very different. And it is about the ever present passion and ingenuity of music lovers – even in the most oppressive circumstances.
It started a few years back when I was on tour with The Real Tuesday Weld in Russia. After a show, I was wandering in a flea market with some Russian friends and on a stall full of oddities, I saw something very odd indeed. My friends didn't know what it was and the guy whose stall was didn't seem bothered but I bought it and brought it back to England. Trying to find out about it has taken me on an extraordinary journey through time and to a very different culture than the one we enjoy now.
In the Soviet Union in the years after the Second World War, a lot of music was forbidden. Of course Western music was banned for being Western but a lot of Russian music was forbidden as well. Anything made by emigres was off-limits because, by definition, any Russian who stayed away from the Soviet Union was considered a traitor, whatever their repertoire. And a lot of homegrown Russian music was also banned. During the Stalinist era, all the arts were supposed to be in the service of communist ideals and were subject to an official censor. Self-expression was out. You could not write and record your own songs.
And then In Leningrad around 1946, something extraordinary happened: bootleggers appeared. They were music fans, driven to incredible feats of ingenuity by their desire to hear and share the songs they loved. Even though the state completely controlled the means of making records, they managed to improvise their own recording machines, recycling parts from gramophones and machine tools to make primitive lathes which could cut the grooves of music onto plastic discs. But there was a problem – where would you get such discs in the Soviet Union? You simply could not buy them.
Then at some point, some incredibly enterprising soul hit on a genius idea. An alternative source of raw materials was found – used x-ray plates clandestinely obtained from local hospitals. Yes, they began to cut forbidden jazz, rock 'n' roll, and banned Russian music onto used X-ray plates, creating ghostly records on images of the interiors of soviet citizens. And that is where the X-Ray Audio project really begins.
With the photographer Paul Heartfield, for the last few years I have been sponsored by Arts Council England to archive the images and and sounds of these discs and to interview whoever we can about their history. As well as a travelling exhibition and documentary, we have written a book about them and about the people who made them. It will be published by Strange Attractor Press in October.
And, perhaps most strangely of all, we hold live events where we cut new x-ray records. Why? We are surrounded by music, We hear it everyday. I love it but sometimes, I wonder if I have stopped listening, if it has stopped mattering. This project is about a time when music mattered so much that people went to prison for it.
Join us next Friday (July 3rd), when I will tell the extraordinary tale of the Sovet Bootleggers. My collaborator Aleks Kolkowski will explain the magic of recording onto plastic and we will cut a performance of a forbidden Russian song sung by Marcella Puppini direct to x-ray – right in front of your eyes. To buy tickets for this event click HERE.
Stephen Coates
www.x-rayaudio.squarespace.com
