Roentgenizdat: Soviet Era "X-Ray LPs" of Banned Western Recordings

From Weird Vibrations

October 12, 2009
Roentgenizdat: Sentimental Songs on X-Ray

In the 1950s, music enthusiasts in the Soviet Union made copies of banned Western records using sheets of x-ray film purchased from clinics and hospitals. Photographic film, like wax, acetate, or vinyl, is thick and firm enough to be used with commercially available music engraving machines. X-rays weren’t the ideal medium, being prone to warping, but they worked well enough, and were cheap to boot.

Comments on roentgenizdat have been floating around for a few years, and Princeton English professor Eduardo Cadava is writing a book on the subject, out soon.

Roentgenizdat are interesting, first, as a series of artifacts. Prefiguring picture disks, non-circular shapes, and other graphically novel record gimmicks, these albums feel like an early example of what few people got into until the 70s and 80s – experimentation with records as objects. Although dubbing onto x-ray was in this case a matter of political necessity rather than unprovoked aesthetic tinkering, the dubbers quite clearly paid attention to the images they chose, as well as the placement of the center holes.

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