story 015 · music · leningrad, the 1950s
the man who cut records on x-rays.
the short, written out
this x-ray of someone’s hands is a record.
in leningrad after the war, bootleggers cut records like it, with songs you couldn’t buy, or weren’t allowed to hear: jazz, and tangos sung by russian émigrés.
one of them, ruslan bogoslovsky, copied a german recording machine at a city studio: he measured it, drew it, and had the parts made.
for records, he used old x-rays. clinics were meant to burn them, and were glad to let them go.
so the songs played on skulls, ribs and spines.
in 1950, he was arrested for the records. when he got out, he rebuilt the machine from his drawings, and made it better.
in 1957, he was arrested again. he spent three years in a camp, reading books on how factories make records.
back home, he built a press, and made proper records, like a factory: louis armstrong, bill haley.
the third time, they caught him at the press. three more years.
in 1999, a friend who had made the x-ray records with him wrote that he deserved a monument. hardly anyone even remembered him.
the print that goes with it
xray blooms
radiograph flower, ghostly seed pod, sepia cream grey, vintage science
no. 217 · a4 · 8.27″×11.69″ to a1 · 23.3″×33.1″ · from $24.00 · see the print
sources
- boris taigin, “the rise and fall of the golden dog underground recording studio (1946–1961)”, pchela no. 20, 1999 (statehistory.ru/5503)
- stephen coates, x-ray audio (x-rayaudio.com), “ruslan bogaslovsky’s criminal record”, 2021, and the garage museum’s bone music exhibition text, 2017
- stephen coates in kommersant weekend, 18 august 2017
pictures
- records from the x-ray audio collection, london (stephen coates; photographs paul heartfield)
- ruslan bogoslovsky, x-ray audio and the bogoslovsky family; in the 1960s, pchela, 1999
- a chest x-ray by mikael häggström, cc0 (a stand-in, cut in a drawing)
- drawings ours
every sentence of the short was checked against its sources before it went out.
