How Cold War Leningrad pressed its forbidden records into other people’s skeletons, and why every bedroom producer who has ever cut a dubplate owes the lot of them a drink.
Somewhere in a private collection there is a recording of Bill Haley spinning across a stranger’s broken ankle. Elsewhere there is jazz cut into a fractured pelvis, a tango riding a cracked rib, rock’n’roll grooved into the shadow of someone’s skull. These are real objects. You can drop a needle on them and they will play, more or less, for a while, before the sound wears thin and the music dissolves back into the X-ray it was scratched onto. Across…