Early 1970s India Field-Recording MP3s

The great wired-world guru Marshall McLuhan commented that artists are the antennae of the human race. That is perhaps nowhere as close to literally true as with artists who use radio and field recordings in their art, and the phrase will linger in your mind when listening to a recent pair of files made available at archive.org (MP3, MP3). Recorded by Jean-Louis Derche during travels in India back in 1971, the subjects include temple music and street sounds — the latter in particular putting a world distant in time, space, and culture just outside your window, and just inside your headphones. On occasion the recordings pause so that Derche can talk about his experience with Other Minds founder and out-radio personality Charles Amirkhanian.