Laurel A Calsoni
Letterform Archive offers a visual explosion of the 1970s–80s punk scene in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.
“From the very beginning, punk’s visual art was deliberately simple, DIY, anybody could make it if you had a demented enough brain. All it took was scissors or a razor blade and some glue, and you could make collages…One wicked idea, especially one that’s going to offend everybody who sees it, that’s the way to go.” — Jello Biafra
Since 2003, we’ve been traveling through time to rediscover and share the legacy of MTV’s 120 Minutes, the classic U.S. TV series that exposed a vast collection of alternative music videos, artist interviews, and live performances to a diverse range of music enthusiasts across several generations.
This project captures and revisits the memories of 27 years of Music Television—this is the soundtrack of our lives.
With hundreds of volunteer contributors like you, we assembled this incredible archive from scratch, rebuilding nearly the entire history of 120 Minutes. Inside, you’ll find the playlists and music videos for 1,005 episodes, spanning across the various iterations of 120 Minutes on both MTV and MTV2 from 1986 to 2013, as well as Subterranean, its successor from 2003 to 2011.
Collection of over 9,000 of the best images from Shorpy.com available as museum-quality prints on archival papers or canvas. For the archive start here
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
Contains more than 2,000 defined entries based primarily on archival literature in the United States and Canada. Search here
Presenting His Bauhaus Teachings (1921-1931)
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
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.
Read More Click HERE
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.”
Read More Click Here
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.
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