Livros sobre música que vale a pena ler - Cromo #99: "Bone Music"

 

autor: Stephen Coates
título: Bone Music

editora: Strange Attractor Press
nº de páginas: 156
isbn: 9781913689476
data: 2022
1ª Edição / 1st Edition

Há uma versão paperback ilimitada, e uma versão hardback, limitada a 350 exemplares e assinada pelo autor, que é a que tenho:

– Includes exclusive risograph print and 7" flexidisc of 1930s Soviet dissident music off the bone.

(ver pormenores aqui: https://strangeattractor.greedbag.com/buy/bone-music/ e aqui: https://www.discogs.com/release/25139482-Various-Bone-Music)

BONE MUSIC

WRITTEN BY STEPHEN COATES.

PUBLISHED BY STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS IN 2022, IN AN UNLIMITED PAPERBACK EDITION AND LIMITED HARDBACK EDITION.

TEXT © STEPHEN COATES 2022

ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL HEARTFIELD.

DESIGN BY TIHANA SARE, LETTERFORMAGIC.COM.

ISBN: 9781913689476

STEPHEN COATES HAS ASSERTED HIS MORAL RIGHT TO BE IDENTIFIED AS THE AUTHOR OF THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE COPYRIGHT, DESIGNS AND PATENTS ACT. 1988.

DISTRIBUTED BY THE MIT PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, AND LONDON, ENGLAND.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN ESTONIA BY

TALLINNA RAAMATUTRUKIKODA.

STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS

BM SAP, LONDON, W1CN 3XX UK.

WWW.STRANGEATTRACTOR.CO.UK

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE

AS THIS BOOK WENT TO PRINT, RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE, BRINGING MASS TERROR, STATE-SPONSORED MURDER, AND THE LIKELIHOOD OF A NEW COLD WAR, BACK TO EUROPE.

CENSORSHIP, EVER-PRESENT TO DIFFERENT DEGREES IN MODERN RUSSIA, HAS MADE A SWIFT AND BRUTAL RETURN TO PRE-PERESTROIKA ORWELLIAN, LEVELS. JOURNALISTS FACE 15 YEARS IN PRISON FOR PUBLISHING ‘FAKE NEWS’: PEACEFUL PROTESTORS CARRYING ‘NO WAR’ SIGNS FACE IMMEDIATE 20 DAYS DETENTION. LIBERAL RADIO STATIONS HAVE BEEN TAKEN OFF AIR, AND ON-LINE ACCESS TO ALTERNATIVE MEDIA SOURCES HAS BEEN BANNED IN REFERENCE TO THE INVASION.

WHILE SINGLING OUT SPECIFIC GENRES OF MUSIC AS FORBIDDEN IS PROBABLY NOW IMPOSSIBLE – AND WOULD LIKELY BE REGARDED AS UNNECESSARY – IT WILL BE NO SURPRISE IF SONGS WITH PERCEIVED ANTI-WAR SENTIMENTS ARE CENSORED. IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN WHETHER SUCH CULTURAL REPRESSION CAN BE MAINTAINED, ESPECIALLY AMONGST THE GENERATIONS OF POST-SOVIET YOUTH WHO HAVE GROWN UP WITH INTERNET ACCESS AND OTHER RELATIVE FREEDOMS. BUT THE STORY OF BONE MUSIC SUGGESTS THAT IT WILL NOT.

 

FOREWORD

X-RAY IN THE USSR

….

ARTEMYI TROITSKY, PRAGUE 2021

 

PREFACE

X- Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone was published by Strange Attractor in 2015. At that time I had been researching the history of x-ray records for about three years. We had no idea then how much interest the story would generate, but the research evolved into an online archive, an international exhibition, a film and a BBC radio documentary. I gave a TED talk and we held many live events, telling the story of the Soviet bootleggers and demonstrating how to cut a live performance to x-ray. We made Bone records of all sorts of artists, including Marc Almond, Jónsi, Thurston Moore, Massive Attack and even Noam Chomsky.

All this testament to the power of Bone Music.

Bone Music is the successor to X-Ray Audio – and it’s overdue. I didn’t want to just publish a revised edition of the earlier book. In the last few years, I have carried out more research, found more records, conducted many more interviews and gained a better understanding of a culture that was layered with ambiguities and contradictions.

Here then are the stories of (among others) Stanislaw Philon, Boris Taigin, Ruslan Bogoslovsky, Mikhail Farafanov, Rudy Fuchs, Aleksei Kozlov, Nick Markovitch and Kolya Vasin, which to say of bootleggers and black-market dealers, of underground engineers, musicians and music fans. In this book we see how the technology of the recording lathe interwines, via the x-ray record, with the histories of the ‘Talking Letter’ and the flexi-disc, and how Bone records emerged in non-communist Hungary probably before they did in the USSR. We learn something of the troubled histories of jazz and rock’n’roll in the Soviet Union, of the frowned-on foreign dance styles, the forbidden émigré artists and Russian underground songs – and about the role in all this of that officially despised Soviet youth culture known as the ‘stilyagi’: the ‘followers of fashion’.

As there are only a few official documents about the x-ray underground, this is largely an oral history: we learned much of what we know directly from the people who lived it. They have seen great changes and collecting their testimony felt rather urgent: many of those who bought and sold Bone Music are dead, and those who survive are elderly. Attila Csànnyi died in 2016, shortly after we interviewed him. Kolya Vasin died in 2019, apparently committing suicide in St Petersburg (Leningrad as it was known pre-perestroika). Others have grown sick and are less able to pass on their recollections.

Off to one side, the Hungarian x-ray narrative, previously just a footnote, has now been significantly expanded. In various forgotten archives in Budapest we discovered what are probably the world’s most extensive collection of x-ray discs, and also learned more about the technique of cutting them – from the writings of the man who literally wrote the manual, István Makai.

Experimenting with that technique over the last few years has been part of the learning process. People, especially young people, love to witness the process of live music being cut onto an x-ray – there is something visceral about it in our digital age, something wonderfully alchemical. Understanding its complexities can only add to the admiration felt for those who practiced it in difficult and often dangerous circumstances.

Perhaps there will be more discoveries about Bone Music. It is no longer the half-hidden history that it formerly was, largely because of the generosity of those who have shared their knowledge and stories. They are stories of human endeavour and of ingenuity as resistance in a time of repression, but also stories of how much music can matter, all held within these wonderfully weird discs with their ghostly skeletal images.

STEPHEN COATES, LONDON, 2022