From Wikipedia, photo by Dmitry Rozhkov of display "Rock on bones" in Gallery "Vinzavod", Moscow (2008)
My father Vladimir was remarking yesterday about an item from his youth in the USSR: People wanted to hear Western music (such as jazz and rock), but the Soviet authorities wouldn't allow it to be distributed. One could sometimes hear it on foreign shortwave broadcasts, but how to record it? And if one could get a smuggled foreign LP, how to duplicate it? Consumer tape recorders were generally unavailable. People had record players, and some people managed to cobble together recording machines for LPs. But the standard recording medium—vinyl—wasn't available to ordinary consumers.
So people would record instead on used X-rays, such as the ones you can see above. The story made its way into the West some time ago; there's a recent book on the subject, Bone Music: Soviet X-Ray Audio, and an accompanying web site. Here's an excerpt from the site:
