Switching hemispheres mid-year has left me throughly disorientated and indifferent as to which season it’s supposed to be where, but I figure summer must be over at last because UbuWeb is back online. For months they’ve had a single page announcing they’d be back after summer, but we all know what that usually means on the interweb.
UbuWeb has a bunch of poetry, essays, arty-type stuff online but the real exciting part is the boatload of free MP3s available to download: hours of brilliant and inexcusably overlooked music.
From the ridiculous
The 365 Days Project. Astonishingly bizarre recordings from garage sales around the world. Sometimes too hip for it’s own good, but when the first half of March can offer such treasures as musical polymath and self-confessed failed wunderkind Nicholas Slonimsky (then aged 96) singing “Children Cry For Castoria”, Van Morrison fulfilling contractual obligations to dead record company owners, Anthony Hopkins most genuinely terrifying performance, Orson Welles facetiously offering blowjobs, and Melbourne’s own Man Who Plays Music On his Fingers, you can hate the sinners and love the sins.
To the sublime
Tapes from the Morton Feldman Archive at SUNY-Buffalo. Dubbed from the archive’s open reel tapes onto cassette, then onto someone’s laptop, and compressed into MP3s, so you can guess the quality of these 1970s recordings aren’t the best. Also, some of the performances sound a bit wonky, but Feldman wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring music of the last 50 years, and some of these pieces have never been released on CD. (Note to Mallrat: if you like Gavin Bryars, Feldman’s the guy he stole all his ideas from.)
When I looked in yesterday, UbuWeb had expanded its collection of experimental films, but today they’ve been taken down after a spate of legal threats from various people – “all lawyers and business people, not the artists themselves.” So you may have to wait a while before really testing your bandwidth out on downloading Samuel Beckett’s Film.
