The vast depths of archive.org‘s holdings are difficult to come to grips with. Even putting the public-domain text and video material aside, there seems to be enough music by the Grateful Dead alone to play for a good year straight, and there’s more like the Dead in that corridor of the archive than anything else — more jam bands, more riff rock, more psychedelic noodling. Not, as they say, there’s anything wrong with that. When you’re pleased by recordings that resemble a century-old radiator on overdrive, it’s tough to go complaining about what someone else calls music.
All of which said, it’s initially hard to find much electronic music in the archive’s live holdings, in part because of the abundance of Dead acolytes, and in part because of the site’s search engine, which prioritizes “mediatype” and other categories over genre. (On the other hand, its netlabel directory serves as a backup for many notable electronica free-music concerns, including 8bitrecs, Monotonik, Nishi and Thinner.) Still, search and you shall find. For example, a search for “DJ” in archive’s live holdings yields over 250 results, among them a July 7, 2002, concert featuring the New Orleans ensemble Dirty Dozen Brass Band with New York turntablist DJ Logic sitting in for two songs (“Africa,” “We Got Robbed”). It may be electronic by association, but it’s a great document of an unusual collaboration (one Logic spoke about at length earlier that year in a Disquiet.com interview, “Sonic Anomaly”).
Oh, and as if finding the concert wasn’t tough enough, you’ll discover that it’s only downloadable as a “flac” file — which is a mix of good and bad news. The good news is, “flac” is a high-quality, so-called “lossless” format; the bad is, it’s enormous (94Mb for 15 minutes of audio, the length of the “Africa” track alone). Check out the full set here.