A Florida musician has claimed his late uncle would be 'smiling up from hell' after turning his skeleton into a playable electric guitar.
In a departure from burials, cremations or even just a plaque on a bench to commemorate the dead, rocker Yaago Anax has managed to put a guitar neck through his late uncle Filip's ribcage and connect it to the hip bones, wiring it up successfully to turn it into a guitar - no doubt ready to play some death metal on.
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Anax claimed the body of his uncle, who died in 1996, was repatriated from his native Greece after a burial plot become too expensive.
However, the Greek Orthodox church generally doesn't agree with cremation so the nephew - who also goes under the moniker Prince Midnight - needed to come up with another way to dispose of the remains.
Anax said: "Greek Orthodox do not cremate and a plot in Greece costs like $150,000 (£108,000).
"There was a long repatriation process with the state department and a funeral director."
However, once he eventually got the skeleton - Filip has been dead for 25 years - he got down to the process of turning it into an instrument, and it wasn't an easy process.
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"It took a couple weeks, because I drilled into a vertebrae and snapped it - there was a good deal of trial and error," the 41 year-old explained.
He also apparently encountered problems with the spine being too rickety to support a stable tuning, so it was reinforced with a steel rod and brackets.
However, once that was sorted he managed to make the tuning stable and now claims the guitar works just as well as any other.
A comforting thought, we suppose, if you can handle the fact you're shredding with a man's corpse.
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Anax also says that if he wants to play above the 12th fret he has to put his hand inside the ribcage. Any spare bones remain in the box they were shipped in.
The musician insists the transformation is a fitting tribute to his uncle, who died in a car accident aged 28.
He said: "Filip was a bit of a goofball, but was very serious about guitar and heavy metal.
"I built the guitar as an homage to my uncle and his influence on me as a heavy metal guitar player.
He claimed the reaction to his gruesome yet impressively technical creation had been wholly positive.
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He said: "I haven't heard anyone disapprove of it.
"Even my mother, who does not like the concept, admits it's what he would have wanted as opposed to being buried. Wouldn't you?
"I think he is smiling up from hell right now."
Thanking everyone who is supposedly touched by his project, Anax added: "I encourage everyone to find their own unique ways to celebrate their loved ones who are no longer here."
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