Tapeti

In the postwar Soviet Union, people were banned from owning albums containing popular music, especially rock or jazz from the West. Those students caught with such contraband were subject to suspension, or even expulsion, from their school or university. For some people, jail time or imprisonment in a labor camp were real possibilities. To counteract this, some ingenious Russian sound engineers developed a way to subvert the ban: they copied albums onto x-ray films they were given by hospital staff eager to discard their “trash.” Playable on a normal record player and more easily smuggled, these x-ray-film records—nicknamed “ribs,” “music on bones,” and “bones”— became a hot commodity on the black market until the advent of the audio cassette tape. Ribs takes a sample of these Soviet recordings, this “jazz on ribs,” and returns them to their original function: to be displayed on a doctor’s x-ray viewer.

Text: Studio Anna Jermolaewa