Crocodile Café Sound Collection

I last reported on the Crocodile Café sound recordings back in last October. I now have the mother of all updates...

First, the background. Audio engineer/sound man from Seattle's long running rock club the Crocodile Café recorded every show he did at the club and saved the recordings on a series of hard drives. After some negotiation, in October 2008 Anderson donated the original digital recordings to the University of Washington's Ethnomusicology Archives. For the past year the University of Washington Libraries' Media Center has been going through over 2,800 hours of live music recordings, copying them to put them in a streaming format, cataloging the shows, and letting bands that didn't want to be part of the archive opt out. Now before all you grunge fanatics go crazy about rare soundboard recordings of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, the donation only included recordings from shows that occurred between May 2002 and December 2007. So the early grunge era isn't really represented in the archive. But there are an insane amount of great bands and shows, you can see the preliminary list here. I'm gonna crack up if I here myself singing into the mic at the Bronx show when the singer jumped out into the audience.

Will you be able to access these recordings online? No.

Will you be able to burn copies of the recordings? No.

Will non-students be able to listen to them? Yes.

Shocking, I know, but you will actually have to set foot in a library to hear them. This is a historical archival collection that will be open to the public beginning Wednesday, August 12th. The collection will be made available via iTunes on two dedicated listening stations at the UW Libraries' Media Center. The Media Center is located on the mezzanine level of the UW's Undergraduate Library, it's hours and location can be found here.