Records have always been the most extraordinary form of time travel for me, and that's why it matters to know when something was circulated, and if it had an audience of five or 50,000.

My experience that undergirds that observation comes from punk, where people might have scraped together the money to be in the studio for an afternoon to make a record. Punk isn't a music that you think of as chance-based, but exigency has a lot to do with it.

The word "archive" seems so reassuring, but I'm not sure about these things that are now being called archives. Is anything lost by the fact that the word has come to mean so many more things.

What a strange thing - that musicians grant permission to places like Ubuweb, and then because it's free, it'll probably be listened to more often than something that is still wrestling with this idea of making a profit.

Kenny Goldsmith from Ubuweb describes himself as an amateur archivist, and people can download files from Ubuweb - it's not a streaming service. But it's a miracle that it's still online and they're able to make it work through the donations of server space and volunteer efforts.

When I read John Cage's book Silence, I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. For me, records were a mode of time travel and geographic travel, interfacing with a much larger world. So it seemed antiquated and backwards that Cage would be so down on them.

I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.