Don Campau has been an active champion of independent underground music even longer than I have. His primary pulpit has been his radio show spanning several decades which has expanded since his “retirement” into multiple shows and helping to manage a station that reaches everywhere with experimental music and home taping shows.
Don created his Living Archive of Underground Music over 10 years ago and it covers similar territory to GAJOOB’s museum with a similar emphasis on people. It was indeed an inspiration to me as I was thinking how to present the material in my own library. Jim Santo of Demo Universe provided technical expertise to get things going with a framework that let Don focus on the content.
The site has had limited access for a couple recent years due to the platform needing updates post-php8 and I’m happy to announce it’s available once again in all its glory after I scaled php back a few versions and commented out some pesky depricated function calls. I’m planning to perform an update on the platform itself (on both the living archive and on Don’s label site, Lonely Whistle). Let’s hope I don’t crash it all!
It’s important to me that this kind of content has a future. All of us who have been active in whatever underground worlds we occupied dating back to 1980’s are 60 or 70+ years-old now. I’d like an exit that accounts for a permanent preservation of underground voices.
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