May 15, 2007

You're not getting any work done today

Other Minds, the epitome of Left Coast new-music fun, has launched radiOM, an online clearing-house for archival recordings from Other Minds-produced concerts and experimental programs from Berkley's KPFA radio. (The announcement was timed to coincide with Lou Harrison's 90th birthday, of course.) As I write, I'm grooving to a 1965 John Cage-David Tudor performance of Christian Wolff's "For 1, 2, or 3 people, any instruments" recorded at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Hours of entertainment for the whole family—4,500 hours, to be exact. That's enough listening to get you to Thanksgiving.

5 comments:

Ben.H said...

Is this in any way different from the Other Minds Archive? 250 programs and counting. They stopped adding things for a while, but now the list is growing again.

(Don't believe the part about the Archive being streaming only: save the M3U file and open it in a text editor to find the URL for the mp3 files.)

Matthew said...

So far? Better interface, mainly. I'm guessing also that as stuff is digitized, it'll go up on the new site. (A quick comparison did turn up at least a couple of items on radiOM that aren't on the Archive site.)

rchrd said...

Actually, all our digital files are on the Internet Archive (archive.org), but if you access them through the radiom.org site you will get more information, better searching, and links to even more.

The interface, created by Charette Design, if tailor-made for radiom.org and we are able to display all the tagging information that is in our database. Eventually we may even display photo images of the label on the original tape box, which may (or may not) be of interest to some.

Matthew said...

There you have it: thanks, rchrd. It's indicative of the improved searching that files that came up near the top of searches on the radiOM site didn't come up at all on the same search at the Archive. Especially some the shows that fall in the categorical cracks—spoken word performances, for example—are more intuitively located through the new site. (Yes, I've been poking around the place all day now.)

Ben.H said...

Excellent! Will check it out very soon.