Music Month 2022
May 2022
Performance by Disasteradio at San Francisco Bath House, Wellington (2015). Photo by Wendy Collings. Ref: PADL-001487. Alexander Turnbull Library
For this year’s NZ Music Month, the Alexander Turnbull Library’s music specialists wrote a selection of blogs about recent music activities and projects.
#1
First up, Thomas Lambert (Digital Archivist) and Michael Brown (Music Curator) looked at a new collection of sonic artist John Cousins. This collection includes thousands of downloadable Creative Commons licensed audio files, some of which can be heard in the blog. While the Cousins Collection has taken a lot of time and work to preserve, due to its technical complexities, it represents a major trove of research material for future investigation.
https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/tales-from-the-acousmonium-part-1
#2
Second off the block, Mark Hector (Music Research Librarian) gave a brief survey of music-related ephemera held at the Alexander Turnbull Library and personal reflection on the appeal of ephemera:
If Proust had his memory involuntarily kick-started by the smell of cake, mine was from an old poster from a flat that I lived in. Recently I found the poster again in the collection of ephemera at the Alexander Turnbull Library, an AO-sized bookmark for my memory.
https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/at-the-still-point-there-the-dance-is
#3
In the next blog, Thomas Lambert and Michael Brown continued the story of the John Cousins collection in Tales from the Acousmonium – Part 2. Here they looked at the digital preservation processing of the Cousins Collection, including issues of tricky filenames, nested folders, SDII files, and missing “resource forks”. As with part 1, there’s lots of interesting field audio to pique your interest.
https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/tales-from-the-acousmonium-part-2
#4
Fourth up, was the 2022 instalment of the annual Turnbull Creative Commons Mixtape! This year Sholto Duncan (Web Archivist) looked back on a decade of mixtapes and crunched the numbers: what tracks have performed well? How often are the blogs viewed – and when? And how much CC music have we collected, anyway? Of course, there’s a mixtape too – a ‘greatest hits’ compilation with all the most popular tracks.
https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/turnbull-mixtape-10-im-never-getting-too-old-for-this-sh-aring
#5
Finally, was a blog with the latest news on the Disasteradio Project by Michael Brown. Archiving of the Disasteradio LP Charisma was completed earlier this year by the Turnbull in-house team and musician Luke Rowell (a.k.a. Disasteradio). The blog looks at Rowell’s career, the challenge of archiving the Charisma sessions, and showcases a couple of the “in the wild” remixes that have appeared since last year’s blog.
https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/the-disasteradio-project