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“Meshes of the Afternoon,” Maya Deren, 1943.

Screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Friday, March 23, 2012

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Velvet Underground & Nico “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (1966, Acetate version)

Info on Acetate Recordings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetate_disc

http://www.loc.gov/folklife/sos/preserve1.html

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Tove Jansson, 1972 (photo by Per Olov Jansson, accessed via the guardian)

The amazing Tove Jansson virtual museum: http://www.moomin.com/tove/index.html

Text (Post) Punk Rock Preservationists: Fugazi and the Archival Impulse

(photo by Bert Queiroz, accessed via NY Times)

Today, the scholar and the punk rocker are not so far removed. As Ben Sesario reveals in his recent NY Times article “Fugazi Rises Again, in Online Archive,” archives have relevance to more communities than scholars, historians, and information professionals. Artists, musicians, and citizen historians are also engaging in intentional acts of documentation for posterity and now have the ability to share and append their work with the availability of more open and collaborative digital environments.

Launching December 1, 2011, Fugazi’s online archive project Fugazi Live Series will showcase concert footage of over 800 performances that the band began recording in 1987 and spent the last two years sorting, labeling, and digitizing.

Besides documenting the band and the post-punk music scene, the project demonstrates the archival impulse and the concurrence of dialogs about archives that are taking place outside of traditional spheres.

Below is a pairing of archives terms with quotes about the online archive project from Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto.

Documentation strategy/collecting policy: “The group never used a set list and sometimes went on improvisatory tangents, so the tapes were partly meant to preserve spontaneous moments that might otherwise be forgotten, said Guy Picciotto, Fugazi’s other leader.”

“The band is encouraging fans to submit additional ephemera and to help fill in gaps of unrecorded shows.”

Appraisal: “We liked this idea of, ‘Let’s just let it be everything,’ “ Mr. Picciotto said. “There doesn’t have to be the idea that this is the great, golden document. It’s all there, and it’s not cleaned up. You get what you get.”

Preservation: “The earliest recordings were made on cassettes, then came digital DAT tapes, then CD-R’s and a few hard drives. Sorting through it involved not only the process of formatting and mastering the audio but also even more tedious chores like scouring hours of onstage banter to identify unlabeled tapes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/arts/music/fugazi-live-series-a-post-punk-bands-archive-of-shows.html?_r=1&hp

Link Lindsay Zoladz "Not Every Girl Is a Riot Grrrl"

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