Stephen Coates

Leningrad, 1946: huge amounts of popular music were banned by the Soviet state, including Western rock ’n’ roll, jazz, songs by Russian émigrés, and urban folk songs about real life in the USSR during the Cold War. Even rhythms such as the foxtrot, tango, and mambo were forbidden.

But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers (clandestine record producers) defied the censors, building their own recording devices and making their own records of the forbidden songs they loved, pressed onto an extraordinary recycled medium — used X-ray film illegally obtained from hospitals.

Who were they? Why did they do it, and how was it possible? Based on years of interviews and oral testimonies, the Bone Music project tells the stories of the first bootleggers, their customers, and those who persecuted them, evoking their spirit of resistance within a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment.

The Bone Music project is an online archive, a book, an award-winning documentary film, and an international traveling exhibition.