99% Invisible and The Kitchen Sisters collaborated to produce two excellent podcasts about Bone Music.

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.

“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.”

Listen to Bone Music by 99% Invisible and in more depth by The Kitchen Sisters

Of course, this is a market where you have to buy a thing on trust. These records were cheap, but they fell apart after a few plays. You couldn’t listen to a sample.

The authorities didn’t want people listing to decadent anti-revolutionary music, so they did a smart thing. They distributed degrading and botched recordings. By crapping in the pool, they made it harder to trust that any particular recording would be worth the risk of the price or being caught.

Which of these would you buy instead of bread if you knew it might be fake?

By Dmitry Rozhkov - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5663775