Two things we can be sure of: necessity is the mother of invention, and interesting things happen when East meets West. We saw both these in The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: when Gabe had to deal with the Golem, and Tanya had to deal with Gabe. But examples are plentiful in real life as well as fiction - take for example this strange bit of history...
Because vinyl was scarce in the Soviet Union, the stilyagi would dig through hospital waste bins to find discarded X-Rays, which were both plentiful and cheap. Using a standard wax disk cutter, the stilyagi would copy Western records that managed to make it into the Soviet Union through satellite countries such as Hungary.
They would then etch a copy of an album into the X-Ray, cut it into a crude circle with manicure scissors, and use a cigarette to burn a hole in the middle, allowing the record to be played on any turntable.
"Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy," Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Joseph Stalin's successor as the U.S.S.R.'s General Secretary explained to NPR. "Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music."
Read the whole article here.
Bone music, you say? Sounds positively magical. Maybe we'll get to do a little twist and shout to some next season on The Witch Who Came In From The Cold!
