After a long downtime, U B U W E B is back online, bigger and cleaner and more amazing than ever. The site is a 100% free repository of avant-garde and conceptual audio and video — concrete poetry, experimental sound works, obscure video. From Erik Satie to John Cage and Sun Ra to Bill Burroughs and Ed Sanders, the depth and quality of the collection is astounding, and seemingly immune from the copyright storms surrounding downloadable/shared audio and video everywhere else online (immunity through obscurity, perhaps). From the FAQ:
What is your policy concerning posting copyrighted material? If it’s out of print, we feel it’s fair game. Or if something is in print, yet absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure, we’ll take a chance on it. But if it’s in print and available to all, we won’t touch it. The last thing we’d want to do is to take the meager amount of money out of the pockets of those releasing generally poorly-selling materials of the avant-garde. UbuWeb functions as a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the web.
I’m listening now to a scratchy original recording by dadaist Tristan Tzara performing probably in some dusty club, somewhere in history’s fog. Find that on BitTorrent!