DIGITAL ARCHIVIST

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.

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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.”

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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.

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Every single song ever recorded by Young is available to stream for free in high-resolution quality

By Alex Young

December 01, 2017

consequenceofsound.net

If ever there was a time to listen to Neil Young, it’s today. The musician’s entire catalog is available to stream for free on his newly launched archival website.

 “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.”

Read more on consequenceofsound.net

SPIN
August 4, 2017

CREDIT: Kevork Djansezian/Getty

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.)

NY Times
January 12, 2017

“Mad Men,” an acclaimed show that explored a bygone era, will itself be grist for future cultural historians, thanks to a donation to the University of Texas at Austin.

Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, and Lionsgate, the producing studio, have given the show’s archive to the university’s Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum. The materials include script drafts and notes for all 92 episodes, costumes and props, as well as a collection of historical ads, magazines and other artifacts the producers used for reference and research.

“Mad Men,” an award-winning drama about angst and advertising in 1960s America, ran on AMC from 2007-2015. Though never a ratings hit, it was a critical favorite that influenced other shows as well as, with its sleek midcentury styling, the worlds of design and fashion.

“It’s our hope that the ‘Mad Men’ archive can satisfy academic curiosity and also provide creative inspiration,” Mr. Weiner said in a statement. “Both artists and scholars can retrace our steps and see how we became interested in the parts of the story we were interested in, and how the creation of the physical world as well as the characters and story lines in the show were the work of many talented people.”

The items and papers, which fill about 150 file boxes, will take roughly a year to catalog, said Steve Wilson, the Ransom Center’s film curator. Afterward, the materials will be available for study by scholars and the general public, and be the subject of future exhibitions. A few items will be on display in the center’s lobby until Feb. 1.

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The World’s Oldest Photography Collection Now Available Online

OpenCulture
January 3, 2017

Eastman’s legacy lives on in another important capacity as well: since the 40s, his Rochester, NY mansion housed one of the largest, the oldest, and perhaps the most impressive collections of photography in the world, the Eastman Museum. “In 1989,” the museum tells us, it “completed construction of a 73,000-square-foot building (more than 70 percent of which is below ground level) that included climate-controlled collection vaults, exhibition galleries, libraries, offices, and photographic conservation and film preservations labs.” And now, over a quarter of a million of the Eastman Museum’s holdings are available online in searchable galleries of “thousands of photographs that date back to the medium’s earliest years,” notes Claire Voon at Hyperallergic, “as well as “objects from its massive library of artifacts that together chronicle the history of image-making.”

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Project Summary

Since 1977, Bay Area punk institution Maximum Rocknroll has been producing a radio show, publishing a monthly magazine, releasing records, organizing shows, and supporting worldwide punk projects. As MRR enters its 40th year, we are undertaking our most ambitious project ever: creating a comprehensive online database of our record collection and music reviews. The project will also see out-of-print issues of the magazine fully digitized. We’re asking for your help to make it possible.

Our collection is the largest assemblage of punk material history on earth. In addition to records, the archive is home to countless rare and unheard demo tapes, zines, photographs, one-of-a-kind record covers designed by the magazine’s founder Tim Yohannan, and flyers dating back to the genre’s inception, many of which will be digitized for the first time. MRR has been instrumental in punk history and historiography, and the archive and database will be an essential resource for record collectors, historians, and anyone interested in punk, hardcore, and garage rock.

Bringing the ultimate punk resource to your browser.
Details here: Maximum Rocknroll Archive