A Norwegian company is preparing what they say is a doomsday vault, intended to preserve a huge variety of music’s most important works, on an arctic island midway between the North Pole and Norway.
The vault, the company say, can survive underground for 1,000 years
From Australian Indigenous music to classics by The Beatles, the Oslo-based Elire Management Group claim the vault – dubbed the Global Music Vault – will endure for at least 1,000 years, buried on the Svalbard archipelago beneath ice and snow at a depth of 1,000 feet. Read more here
Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. Because of that, much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter’s work, which at its most distinctive defines its own category of abstraction, still exudes a vitality today. Read More Click Here
The New York Public Library is issuing 6,000 limited-edition library cards to celebrate the opening of the Lou Reed Archive. Credit Jonathan Blanc/The New York Public Library
By Sara Aridi March 15, 2019
After
two years of cataloging and preparing, the Lou Reed Archive at the New
York Public Library’s performing arts branch at Lincoln Center opens to
the public on Friday. And to celebrate, the library is issuing 6,000
limited-edition library cards featuring an image of Reed taken by Mick Rock in 1972.
The library acquired the archive — a large collection of notes, photographs, and more than 600 hours of recordings — after the rocker’s wife, Laurie Anderson, decided to share it with an institution that could preserve and showcase it.
Before Reed died in 2013, he had never discussed what to do with his belongings, Anderson said in a phone interview.
Julia Gorton took epic Polaroids of Television, Blondie, Lydia Lunch, and more, and now she’s rolling out her collection on Instagram.
A downtown fixture behind a Polaroid camera at Hell’s Angels bar-turned-nightclub CBGBs, Julia Gorton took hundreds of photos of the characters that epitomized the 70s, which are slowly making their way to the public eye through her Instagram. Having first tried her hand at photography in high school thanks to a rec program director who sold her a Rangefinder for $20, and the assistance of a yearbook teacher who taught her to develop film, Gorton moved to New York from her native Delaware in 1976 and graduated to snapping Polaroids of the major acts of the burgeoning punk scene. “I don’t know what he might have seen in me that made him think I should have a camera, but I’m eternally grateful,” she said in a recent interview, of the man who sold her that first camera. “It changed my life forever.”
From Reverb, Published Apr 18, 2018 by Joel Handley
Britain’s national radio station has shared a huge cache of sound files from its archives—16,000 recordings from across the world and throughout its 90-year history of broadcasting.
Download the full collection of 16,000+ sound effects from the BBC archives Download via BBC or here
As you may imagine from a station that began near the end of Britain’s imperial era and continued to aspire to global news coverage, there is a huge diversity in the sound files.
The collection includes audio clips such as “South American parrot talking and screeching” and “Morocco: Marrakesh, market square with music & distant traffic,” as well as charming local fare like various “Westminster Abbey bells” and “1 lorry passing slowly.” The set also includes sound effects created in the BBC studios for radio plays and other programs.
While the files retain their copyrights by the BBC, they are available for free to download and use for all “personal, educational, or research purposes,” and can be requested (and presumably licensed) for commercial use.
Check out all of the sound files for yourself here. And if you find any good snare hits, let us know in the comments.
Lets You Hear Trances, Paranormal Music, Glossolalia & Other Strange Sounds (1905-2007)
We’ve all had our wits scared out of us by films, images, and the written word, but somehow few forms work their haunting magic quite so effectively as sound alone. Think of the snap of the twig in the woods or the creak of the staircase in the empty house — or, to take it farther, the sound of possessed children speaking in tongues. You can hear recordings of that and other unusual phenomena at Ubuweb, which hosts the collection Occult Voices – Paranormal Music, Recordings of Unseen Intelligences 1905-2007.
“We developed [the archive] to provide fans and historians with unprecedented access to all of my music and my entire archive in one convenient location,” writes Young in an open letter introducing the archive.
The songs are organized chronologically spanning more than 50 years. Included are all of Young’s released solo titles, as well as his records made with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and Crazy Horse.
Additionally, there are ten unreleased albums and a few unreleased films. “These are projects I did not release at the time for one reason or another, and many of the songs subsequently appeared on other albums as the years flew past,” Young explains. “The archive is designed to be a living document, constantly evolving and including every new recording and film as it is made. It is not yet complete as we are still adding a lot of detail to the older recordings.”
This morning, Neil Young officially announced the impending release of Hitchhiker, a solo acoustic album he recorded in 1976 but decided against putting out at the time. As Pitchfork notes, he also announced an upcoming online archival project that will include all of Young’s music released between 1963, when he cut his first single, and the present.
Young touted the new archive in a note posted on his website, which you can read in full here. According to the note, the archive will include an interactive timeline of Young’s vast discography, with “credits, memorabilia, films or videos, press and photographs” associated with each release. There’s also an intriguing mention of “unreleased albums,” a potential reference to several records that, like Hitchhiker, Young recorded but never made available to listeners.
Young is a longtime advocate for high-fidelity audio, and the archive will also make his entire catalog available for streaming via Xstream, his new proprietary streaming service. (No word on whether this will change the status of Young’s music on traditional streaming services like Spotify, where it was restored after a lengthy absence last fall.) There’s no specific date for when the archive will launch, but Young’s website claims it will be “opening soon.)
In a bid to preserve circus culture, Illinois State University’s Milner Library is making more than 300 circus route books available online
By Lauren Young
smithsonian.com
For yearView posts, Illinois State University’s Milner Library has made it its mission to preserve the history of the circus. Its massive Circus and Allied Arts Collection includes trapeze fly bars, leotards, thousands of promotional posters and over 10,000 brightly colored Kodachrome slides of performers. The oldest book in its archive dates back to the early 16th century—a 1521 book on how to train your horse to please the court.
Now, the library has received $268,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to digitize more than 300 circus route books dating from 1842 to 1969. The three-year project will ensure that circus history is preserved for future generations, the university announced in a press release.
Circus route books contain a treasure trove of historical data. They were typically produced after a season ended, Maureen Brunsdale, Milner Library’s head of special collections and rare books, tells Smithsonian.com. The booklets record the order of acts, how large the shows were, not to mention the names of workers and performers involved in the productions (from the president to the elephant boss). They also chronologue some deeply personal anecdotes from life in the circus. Brunsdale recalls one letter printed in a route books where the wife of a performer laments about her husband’s death after he broke his neck following a horrible fall in Boston in 1933.
“It seeps into your soul, holding that letter,” Brunsdale tells Smithsonian.com.“[The route books] gives us a real snapshot of what the circus looked like.”
