The X-Ray Audio Project While on tour with
The Real Tuesday Weld in Saint Petersburg, the English musician Stephen Coates came across an X-ray record at a market stall. Coates was inspired to launch
The X-Ray Audio Project, an initiative to provide a resource of information about
roentgenizdat recordings with visual images, audio recordings and interviews. In November 2015, after several years of research and interviewing bone bootleggers, his book
X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone was published by Strange Attractor. In June 2015, Coates gave a TED talk on the subject at TEDX Kraków. He and sound artist and researcher
Aleksander Kolkowski went on tour, telling the story of the Soviet X-ray bootleggers and cutting new X-ray records from live musical performances as a demonstration of the process. The touring exhibition Coates created with photographer Paul Heartfield was covered in
The Guardian and on BBC Radio 4's
Today programme. In September 2016, the pair released the long-form documentary
Roentgenizdat featuring interviews with original Soviet-era bootleggers and archive footage. In 2019, Coates wrote and presented
Bone Music, a documentary based around interviews carried out in Russia for an edition of BBC Radio 3's
Between The Ears series. The programme told the story of
underground culture of forbidden music in Cold War era Soviet Union and featured the Russian band
Mumiy Troll recording a
Vadim Kozin song cut straight to X-ray.
Archival collections Other preservation projects conserving collections ribs music include: • The
Richard W. Judy and Jane M. Lommel Collection of X-Ray Film Recordings at
Great American Songbook Foundation Library & Archives includes 18 distinct records and digitized audio from recordings of
The Andrews Sisters and
Bill Haley & His Comets. • ==In popular culture==