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.

The word 'archive' seems so reassuring, but I have a lot ofconcern over the longevity of documentary materials.

Otherwise the history just gets completely flattened out, and people imagine that everything was always available and accessible. One of the things that struck me was the way in which the landscape of experimental music seemed different at different points in time, on the basis of where one was situated geographically, if one had access to live performances, and what was released at a particular time.

I found myself thinking about the distance between the 60s and today through certain moments. Like the Henry Flynt interview with Ubuweb founder Kenny Goldsmith, where he talks about how he was scarred by how proud John Cage was to be ignorant of popular music. Goldsmith says, "Nobody thinks twice nowadays about listening to everything!" Something that had seemed so uniquely, radically syncretistic in Flynt's day seems much more commonplace now.

The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that's not the language that I instinctively use. They're not scored, and arrangements are often arrived at collaboratively. I always choose to play with people whose input I desire.

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.