Oh good. Just when Spotify was starting to get boring! The Alan Lomax Archive and the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) have officially launched the ACE Online Archive, which they’re calling “the fulfillment of over a decade of the restoration, digitization, and cataloging of Alan Lomax’s life’s work” and I’m calling a major getting-shit-done distraction. In case you’re not from around this solar system, Lomax is like the Colonel Sanders of American folklore (yes, I’m assuming KFC exists in other star clusters): he roamed the globe for 70 years in a time-traveling DeLorean, documenting, researching, and advocating for the original recipe chicken, steaming-hot buttermilk biscuits, and convincingly-brown gravy that is true folk tradition; while all-the-while trying to quantum-leap back home to his hometown of San Dimas, California to prevent flunking high school History class. I mean, I assume that’s what Colonel Sanders did too, don’t you?
Anyway, The ACE Online Archive has basically stuck an 80GB iPod’s worth of tunes up on the internet that’s browse-able, searchable, and stream-able from pretty much any computer. And in addition to those 17,000 full-streaming audio field-recordings collected by Lomax between 1946 and 1991, there’s also “5,000 photographic prints and negatives; sixteen hours of vintage radio transcriptions; and ninety hours of interviews, discussions, and lectures by Alan Lomax and his colleagues.” The ridiculous convenience is kinda insulting to Lomax in a way, when you think about it… but I can’t do that right now because I gotta go order my groceries online.
Oh, but before I go, The Archive says that additional sessions will be added when restoration and cataloging is complete, including Lomax’s 1954–55 Italian and 1985 Louisiana expeditions, several of his collections made under that pesky “Library of Congress” title, and some really loop-heavy solo shit he’d been working on with the dude from WHY?.
Commence to digging:
• ACE Online Archive: http://research.culturalequity.org
• Sound Collection Guide: http://research.culturalequity.org/audio-guide.jsp
• Photograph Collection Guide: http://research.culturalequity.org/photo-guide.jsp
• Alan Lomax Archive and the Association for Cultural Equity: http://www.culturalequity.org
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