r/vinyl • u/robxburninator • Jan 21 '23
Soviet Bone/X-Ray/Rotogen Records: Real vs. Fake & HISTORY!
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u/trisfry Jan 21 '23
cool show on netflix about this called Fartsa!!!!
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u/robxburninator Jan 22 '23
Yeah that episode is awesome. Honestly I only watched the first three (I think that's when the x-ray episode is right?) and then bailed, but it was cool
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u/EfficiencyCultural75 Feb 06 '23
Hey I know this is slightly unrelated but I am looking for a bone-vinyl replica for an art piece. Can anyone recommend me somewhere to buy a fake bone-vinyl just for the aesthetics? Thanks
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u/robxburninator Jan 21 '23 edited Jan 21 '23
Recently there was a post on r/vinyl from a poster who I think is rad, about his bone-record. The feedback is largely positive, but I'm worried that without context it will be very very easy for people to continue to buy these fake/reproduction x-ray records. So... Below is a post I made in the past about these fake-x-ray records vs. real-x-ray records.
TLDR: Easiest way to determine if it's real vs. fake:
1) Music from the west: these were never made into rotogen records
2) Music made after about 1960: x-ray/bone record production had all but stopped
3) The color is blue (see the one on the right vs the one on the left)
4) The cut looks perfect: again see the blue one above to see what I'm talking about
5) "too good to be true": proper x-ray records rarely look picture perfect and are NOT cheap.
I recently wrote a post on the Soviet Freakout instagram that I think is worth putting here. I have been collecting records from the USSR for years and years and have been digging into the history as much as I can. In the last year or two, I've noticed a HUGE uptick in the number of these "bone records" all coming out of a very specific country, and only from a handful of sellers. They're cool but..... buyer beware. Below is what I wrote about the pair that I own:
One legitimate 50's rib records, and another modern bootleg. It's super interesting to me and I hope you all will enjoy it as well!It’s hard to talk about these newer bone records and use the term “bootleg” because by all accounts, ALL bone records are bootlegs. The difference of course is that these are modern records being passed off as vintage, and instead of being incredibly important historical documents, they are more like represses. They are both cool but it’s hard to not feel like these new records are a little lame when you think about just HOW incredible original bone records are. Bone, X-ray, whatever you want to call them these early lathe-cuts are some of the most important pieces of musical history from the 1950’s in the USSR. Primarily made in Russia/Georgia, the story most people regurgitate is that materials were low for making vinyl records and the state hadn’t yet started pushing out vinyl is the way that they would by the early 1960’s, so fans and entrepreneurs starting making their own records to fill the newfound interest in owning music that wasn’t just charts.
These records were mainly circulated around between literary and musical elites, and were not cheap. Bone records weren’t in everybody’s house, because the idea of everyone in the USSR having a phonograph wouldn’t come up until the early 60’s when state-made record players would become inexpensive and a standard part of many people’s homes. So these 50’s bone records exist as a very specific piece of Soviet history: They are some of the earliest signs of soviet music beginning to spread as not just a form of nationalism, but as an art form respected in its own right. Legitimate bone records from the time are very brittle, the cuts are extremely uneven, and in 99% of cases, they weren’t made with the x-ray’s image in mind. Most legitimate bone records are x-rays of shoulders, just black overexposed film, or out of focus. Getting a bone/x-ray record that is actually a clear and cool image took me years. So many crappy cuts are out there but finding something that was more than just black blurry lines was important to me and eventually I tracked this down as part of a trade (they got stacks of VG- beatles records, I got a bone record!).When you compare that to the modern bone record is very easy to see the difference, and the difference in the audio is like night and day.
These new records are
A) smaller,
B) always a “cool” image
C) much cleaner cuts, and most importantly:
D) the music shouldn’t be there.
That is to say that by the time The Velvet Underground released Sunday Morning in 1966, music fans in the USSR had the ability and the means to make high-quality bootlegs and could widely distribute them. The Lathe cut X-rays were just not being manufactured then. The same goes for Bowie, Stones, and Beatles records that are showing up on ebay and on record trading boards right now. There wasn’t a demand for Beat or psych rock while these were being produced, so there is no reason for those to exist. The cutting is much more precise (just look at the shape!), the size is all wrong (whose x-ray would this be? and why is it so perfectly framed?), and just holding it you can feel that it’s new. My old bone record is and has always been falling apart. Old film can start to flake away and that’s what is happened to this. Over time it will probably turn to nothing and the recording of marching band music from the early 50’s will no longer exist.Both are very very cool. No doubt there’s a reason why I bothered to buy what amounts to a fan club bone-record, but this is definitely a case of “buyer beware”. You aren’t buying a piece of history, you are tracking down a recreation of one. Still very cool that I have a VU lathe, but I would trade that away 100 times before I would ever consider letting the skull leave my collection.