I found myself thinking about the distance between the 60s and today through certain moments. Like the Henry Flynt interview with Ubuweb founder Kenn….

There's part of me that is a strict materialist..

Kenny Goldsmith from Ubuweb describes himself as an amateur archivist, and people can download files from Ubuweb - it's not a streaming service. But ….

When I read John Cage's book Silence, I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. For me, records were a mode of time travel and geographic travel, int….

I recall improvisational drummer and composer Michael Evans telling me a story of someone who had the opportunity to meet Cage and give him a record,….

The question of art songs always came up with Gastr del Sol. I think Jim O'Rourke had it right in being clear that there's a tradition of art song - ….

There's a book of interviews with John Cage by Joan Retallack called Musicage that was finished the summer that he died, in 1992. And in one of the l….

As there are more online archives of improvised music, it becomes more like the daily practice of playing it. It lessens the idea of there being mast….

Chance in music doesn't have to involve the I Ching or rolling dice or throwing yarrow stalks. It can involve an out-of-tune guitar, or other impossi….

I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless….

If the records that I make have one thing in common, it's that there is little recapitulation, and the idea is that it should end in a place very dif….

What a strange thing - that musicians grant permission to places like Ubuweb, and then because it's free, it'll probably be listened to more often th….

Records have always been the most extraordinary form of time travel for me, and that's why it matters to know when something was circulated, and if i….

Otherwise the history just gets completely flattened out, and people imagine that everything was always available and accessible. One of the things t….

The word "archive" seems so reassuring, but I'm not sure about these things that are now being called archives. Is anything lost by the fact that the….

My experience that undergirds that observation comes from punk, where people might have scraped together the money to be in the studio for an afterno….

In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhym….

The word 'archive' seems so reassuring, but I have a lot ofconcern over the longevity of documentary materials..

The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that's not the language that I instinctively use. They're not scored, and arrangements ….

For me, it's good to have those dissimilar modes of songwriting sit side-by-side on a record, because they yield such different results..

The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. ….