X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone
THURSDAY 21st 7.30pm-8.30pm £10
Leningrad 1946: huge amounts of music have been forbidden by the Soviet state including Western Rock ’n’ roll and Jazz, Russian emigre tunes and urban folk songs about real life in cold war era USSR. Hell, even the foxtrot, tango and mambo are off the menu.
But music-mad bootleggers have come up with an amazingly ingenious, if risky, way to defy the censor by making and distributing their own records. Only thing is they have to build their own recording machines and improvise discs to record onto – all out of view of a brutally repressive regime.
Their wares became popular with a population desperately hungry for the music they really loved, rather than the music they were supposed to love. Some were caught and went to prison but it didn’t stop them.
Stephen Coates tells their story – a tale of music as resistance, bootleg technology, human endeavour – and very strange records – whilst asking himself ‘what would I risk for the sake of a song” and ‘so how much does music actually weigh these days?’
Stephen is a musician. He records as The Real Tuesday Weld, He is the author of the X-Ray Audio project, makes programs and writes.