Music Podcast Collection — Classical, Jazz, and Rock

in Music | October 1st, 2006

Clas­si­cal

• An Inti­mate Tour Through the Music of Yo-Yo Ma iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Each episode of this pod­cast delves into the his­to­ry of his career, and what led him to record each of the tracks of his cur­rent release Appas­sion­a­to.
• Bach Pod­cast from Magnatune.com iTunes Feed Web Site
  • 60 free min­utes of Bach.
• Bach Fes­ti­val of Philadel­phia Feed Web Site
  • Live per­for­mances of J.S. Bach works per­formed by var­i­ous artists for The Bach Fes­ti­val of Philadel­phia.
• Boston Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra Con­ser­va­to­ry iTunes Feed Web Site
  • This edu­ca­tion­al pod­cast gives you an inside look at the sym­pho­ny. Cur­rent­ly you will find a two sea­son overview and record­ings of Beethoven and Arnold Schoen­berg.
• Clas­si­cal Per­for­mance iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Clas­si­cal music per­for­mances from WGBH’s Stu­dio One in Boston.
• Com­posers Date­books iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Amer­i­can Pub­lic Media’s Com­posers Date­book informs, engages, and enter­tains with time­ly infor­ma­tion about com­posers of the past and present.
• Dan­marks Radio — Mozart Sym­phonies Feed Web Site
  • For the cel­e­bra­tion of Mozart’s 250th anniver­sary, Den­mark radio offered pod­casts of nine Mozart sym­phonies by the Dan­ish Radio Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra. Since the web site is in Dan­ish, your best bet is to access these high qual­i­ty MP3’s through the feed.
• Deutsche Welle
  • Beethoven­fest iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Beethoven’s most famous sym­phonies per­formed by excel­lent young orches­tras and new com­po­si­tions by award-win­ning com­posers.
  • Clas­si­cal Mas­ter­pieces iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Six mas­ter com­posers, six sym­phonies, a star con­duc­tor and a lead­ing orches­tra are the main ingre­di­ents of this remark­able musi­cal feast.
• Gramo­phone Pod­cast Feed Web Site
  • A month­ly win­dow into the world’s most author­i­ta­tive clas­si­cal music mag­a­zine, fea­tur­ing an overview of the best releas­es, news, exclu­sive inter­views with lead­ing fig­ures from the music world, and lots of great music.
• New Clas­si­cal Tracks with Julie Amach­er iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Host Julie Amach­er pro­vides an in-depth explo­ration of a new clas­si­cal music release each week.
• Nax­os Clas­si­cal Music Spot­light iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A lead­ing clas­si­cal music label looks at new releas­es, as well as the per­form­ers and com­posers who make Nax­os’ record­ings.
• NPR Music iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Reviews, musi­cian inter­views, live record­ings from Morn­ing Edi­tion, All Things Con­sid­ered, and oth­er NPR pro­grams.
• Phil­har­mo­nia Orches­tra Video Pod­casts iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A month­ly series of video pod­casts takes you behind the scenes with the Phil­har­mo­nia Orches­tra, includ­ing inter­views with con­duc­tors, soloists and lis­ten­ing guides to famous pieces from the clas­si­cal reper­toire.
• Radio Swe­den: Mozart iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Swedish Radio has launched a Mozart Pod­cast to cel­e­brate Mozart’s 250th birth­day. They’ve been pod­cast­ing their own record­ings from the 1940–1950s of Mozart’s operas.
• The Con­cert iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and more from the Isabel­la Stew­art Gard­ner muse­um in Boston.
• The Music of Mas­ter­works iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Sony BMG Mas­ter­works pro­vides pod­casts fea­tur­ing inter­views with artists and upcom­ing releas­es.
• Wag­n­er Operas Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Fea­tures, among oth­er things, per­for­mances from the Bayreuth Fes­ti­val.

Jazz & Blues

• Bend­ing Cor­ners Feed Web Site
  • Bend­ing­Corners explores the groove with­in: acid jazz, afro-beat, bop, cool jazz, cos­mic jazz, dub, down­tem­po, elec­tro-jazz, fusion, future jazz, groove jazz, jaz­za­tron­ic, jazz dance, jazz-funk, jazz-rock, kozmi­groov, modal, phu­sion, pro­gres­sive, mod­ern, nu-jazz, soul-jazz, spir­i­tu­al, and world.
• Brook­lyn Jazz Under­ground iTunes Web Site Blog
  • A pod­cast look­ing at the Brook­lyn jazz scene. Part music, part inter­view.
• Chris­t­ian McBride Pod­casts iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Talks with and pefor­mances by bassist Chris­t­ian McBride. Includes some video clips.
• Detroit Jazz Stage iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A month­ly pod­cast fea­tur­ing the best in the Detroit jazz scene.
• In the Groove, Jazz and Beyond iTunes Feed Web Site
  • From Jazz mas­ters of past and present to emerg­ing new artists per­form­ing hard-bop jazz and fusion. Fea­tur­ing Inde­pen­dent Jazz artists from around the world. A pop­u­lar pod­cast.
• Jazz Cor­ner Innerviews Feed Web Site
  • Jazzcorner.com innerviews are vignettes with insight­ful com­men­tary, inter­est­ing sound bites and lots of great music with great jazz mas­ters and up and com­ing musi­cians. Each pod­cast ranges in time from 4 min­utes to more than an hour.
• Jazz in Chica­go iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Inter­views and infor­ma­tion about the jazz scene in Chica­go.
• Jazz Pod­cast from Mag­natune iTunes Feed Web Site
  • 60 min­utes of straight, high qual­i­ty jazz.
• NPR Piano Jazz Shorts iTunes Feed Web Site
  • For more than twen­ty-five years, pianist Mar­i­an McPart­land has wel­comed a stel­lar line-up of jazz artists for con­ver­sa­tion and impro­vi­sa­tion on her Peabody Award-win­ning pro­gram. Piano Jazz show­cas­es both acclaimed artists and up-and-com­ing per­form­ers.
• Pat Methe­ny — The Song X Podu­men­tary iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Gui­tarist Pat Methe­ny explores his influ­ences, record­ings, music and more on this inti­mate pod­cast series.
• Port­land Jazz Jams Pod­show iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Live jazz jams, inter­views with great play­ers, and instruc­tion­al mate­ri­als, all com­ing out of the Port­land jazz scene.
• Son­ny Rollins Pod­cast iTunes Web Site
  • A 12-part video pod­cast series to be released in month­ly install­ments. It intro­duces Son­ny Rollins, a major Amer­i­can jazz fig­ure, to new lis­ten­ers.
• Swing is in the Air iTunes Web Site
  • Although swing is some­thing of a focus here, this pod­cast com­ing out of Cana­da also looks at oth­er jazz forms.
• The His­to­ry of Chica­go Blues iTunes Web Site
  • Nar­rat­ed by Bud­dy Guy, this enhanced and exten­sive pod­cast takes you on a tour (geo­graph­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal) of Chicago’s rich blues tra­di­tion.
• The Jazz Suite Feed Web Site
  • This is a pod­cast ded­i­cat­ed to Jazz played by inde­pen­dent and indie artists that the major music labels have missed.
• The Night Pas­sage Jazz Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
  • An Eng­lish-lan­guage pod­cast com­ing out of Rome, Italy.
• The Tra­neu­men­tary iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A series of pod­casts fea­tur­ing the work of the jazz great, John Coltrane.

Rock

• Beat­legs Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Fea­tures rare inter­views or behind the scenes clips, fol­lowed by a rare out­take or live per­for­mance that few have heard before.
• Bea­t­les Minute iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A pod­cast com­ing out of Philadel­phia that gives you short, dai­ly tid­bits about the band.
• Bob Dylan Pod­cast iTunes Web Site
  • Pat­ti Smith hosts music and con­ver­sa­tion about Bob Dylan. His friends, ear­ly influ­ences and col­lab­o­ra­tors dis­cuss their close rela­tion­ships with Dylan, the sto­ries behind his great­est songs and oth­er mem­o­rable moments of his career. Jour­nal­ists and biog­ra­phers add crit­i­cal insights and pro­vide his­tor­i­cal con­texts.
• Bono: The Rolling Stone Inter­view iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Jann Wen­ner leads a long and wide-rang­ing inter­view with the lead singer of U2.
• Elvis Costel­lo: The First Ten Years iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Elvis Costel­lo looks back at the begin­ning of his music career.
• George Har­ri­son: Liv­ing in a Mate­r­i­al World iTunes
  • A look back at George Harrison’s 3rd solo album. Includes talks with artists who played on the album.
• John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Inter­view iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Con­duct­ed by Jann Wen­ner (the founder of Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine) this famous 1970 inter­view with John Lennon was con­duct­ed short­ly after The Bea­t­les’ bit­ter breakup. Run­ning over 3 hours, it is one of Lennon’s most exten­sive inter­views, touch­ing not just on the breakup, but also on art and pol­i­tics, drugs, Yoko, pri­mal ther­a­py and more.
• John Lennon: The Lost Lennon Tapes iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed by West­wood One in 1988, this pod­cast presents a col­lec­tion of Lennon’s pri­vate tapes — tapes that include ear­ly record­ings of The Bea­t­les, radio inter­views with John, demo tapes, chron­i­cles of the Dou­ble Fan­ta­sy record­ing ses­sions, and pri­vate moments at home.
• Pet Sounds 40th Anniver­sary Pod­cast iTunes Web Site
  • The Beach Boys look back at their album that is con­sis­tent­ly con­sid­ered their finest and an impor­tant one in the rock tra­di­tion. The pod­cast includes 15 tracks.
• Rolling Stone: Best New Bands (Video) iTunes
• The Beach Boys: The Warmth of the Sun iTunes Web Site
  • Nar­rat­ed by The Beach Boys them­selves, this pod­casts looks at the band’s artistry and com­plex lega­cy.
• The Elvis Pres­ley Pod­cast iTunes Web­site
  • This pod­cast, which fea­tures musi­cal excerpts and inter­views, revis­its the King’s unpar­al­leled musi­cal career.

Also see our col­lec­tion of Mp3 Music Blogs.

• An Aquar­i­um Drunk­ard: Based in Los Ange­les, this eclec­tic audio blog “bridges the gap between con­tem­po­rary indie and vin­tage garage, psych-folk, coun­try, New Orleans funk, R&B, soul and every­thing that falls in between.”
• Brook­lyn Veg­an: Here you get a New York City-cen­tric, most­ly-music blog that focus­es on report­ing music news, live show reviews, tour dates, and, yes, MP3’s.
• Cacoph­o­nous: A clas­si­cal music MP3 blog.
• Chrome­waves: Along with the rumi­na­tions of a self-con­fessed indie rock geek, you get an “MP3 of the Week” that fea­tures a ran­dom or not-so-ran­dom cov­er song.
• Daytrot­ter: Gives you “exclu­sive, re-worked, alter­nate ver­sions of old songs and unre­leased tracks by some of your favorite bands and by a lot of your next favorite bands.”
• Des­ti­na­tion: Out: A jazz blog focus­ing on rare or out-of-print music. Typ­i­cal­ly pub­lish­es twice a week, and leaves songs avail­able for about two weeks.
• Dis­co­belle: A Swe­den-based music blog that posts sin­gle tracks and remix­es and occa­sion­al­ly exclu­sive mix­es from DJs all around the world.
• Done Wait­ing: Part film, part music with MP3s.
• Elbows: A meta col­lec­tion of great music blog posts, which col­lec­tive­ly pro­vides you a snap­shot of what’s going on in the new genre of audio/music blog­ging.
• Fluxblog: One of the old­est and most com­mon­ly cit­ed MP3 blogs, this site posts two MP3s every week­day along with more relat­ed infor­ma­tion.
• Goril­la vs. Bear: One of the big­gies worth check­ing out.
• I Guess I’m Float­ing: A good music blog with a good sprin­kling of MP3s.
• Idol­a­tor: Maybe this sum­ma­ry will help: “When the inter­net came, we over­threw the pasty white tastemak­ers, the duplic­i­tous music mar­keters and the man­u­fac­tured pop idols. And then they all came back. This is Idol­a­tor. We’re so dis­ap­point­ed.”
• La Blo­gotheque: A well-regard­ed French lan­guage MP3 blog.
• Large­heart­ed Boy: A “music blog fea­tur­ing dai­ly free and legal music down­loads as well as news from the worlds of music, lit­er­a­ture, and pop cul­ture.”
• Marathon Packs: Writes about and lets you lis­ten to inter­est­ing songs, to para­phrase the sites self-descrip­tion. Keeps audio files post­ed for two weeks.
• Moist­works: An audio blog start­ed in April 2004 (mean­ing it has a track record) that gets updat­ed Mon­day through Fri­day.
• Motel De Moka: A dai­ly blog post­ing eclec­tic playlists, includ­ing indie rock, acoustics and ambi­ent.
• My Old Ken­tucky Blog: What’s new and hot in indie rock, pop, folk and hip-hop.
• Noth­ing But Green Lights: An MP3 blog that keeps track of indie, elec­tro, folk & pop, all from the UK. The site only posts tracks that the inter­net is giv­ing away for free, or ones that have been grant­ed per­mis­sion.
• Prod­uct Shop NYC: Although not exclu­sive­ly an MP3 blog, you do get some MP3s worth your time here.
• Said the Gramo­phone: Launched in 2003, the site is among the first MP3 blogs and it offers a dai­ly sam­pler of “real­ly good songs,” although all songs are removed with­in a week or two of post­ing. The blog comes out of Cana­da.
• Six Eyes: An MP3 blog by Alan Williamson.
• Skat­ter Brain: A most­ly indiepop music blog.
• So Much Silence: MP3s a plen­ty.
• Soul Crates: Your home for soul MP3s.
• Stere­ogum: A pop­u­lar gos­sipy blog about the indie music scene. The site often posts MP3s of new music, plus offers record reviews, announces tour dates, and cov­ers music fes­ti­vals.
• The Hype Machine: The Hype Machine tracks and aggre­gates a vari­ety of MP3 blogs. Anoth­er meta approach.
• The Music Slut: A com­pre­hen­sive music blog with oodles of MP3s.
• Trrill: Anoth­er good clas­si­cal music audio blog.
• WFMU Beware of the Blog: An MP3 blog run by WFMU, an inde­pen­dent freeform radio sta­tion broad­cast­ing out of NYC.
• Who Needs Radio?: We believe in music, not mon­ey. We’re here to keep your ears alive.
• You Ain’t No Picas­so: A good music blog with a very nice blogroll and MP3s too.

Complete Podcast Collection — Fill Your Ipod

in Uncategorized | October 1st, 2006

100s of cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al pod­casts. Email a friend about Open
Cul­ture.

• Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts
• Audio Book Pod­casts
• For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts
• News/Information Pod­casts
• Sci­ence Pod­casts
• Tech­nol­o­gy Pod­casts
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts — All
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts — Busi­ness School

 Learn to Use Pod­casts — Buy a New iPod (Ama­zon)

Music Podcast Collection

in Music | September 10th, 2006

Clas­si­cal

• Bach Pod­cast from Magnatune.com iTunes Feed Web Site
  • 60 free min­utes of Bach.
• Boston Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra Con­ser­va­to­ry iTunes Feed Web Site
  • This edu­ca­tion­al pod­cast gives you an inside look at the sym­pho­ny. Cur­rent­ly you will find a two sea­son overview and record­ings of Beethoven and Arnold Schoen­berg.
• Clas­si­cal Per­for­mance iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Clas­si­cal music per­for­mances from WGBH’s Stu­dio One in Boston.
• Com­posers Date­books iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Amer­i­can Pub­lic Media’s Com­posers Date­book informs, engages, and enter­tains with time­ly infor­ma­tion about com­posers of the past and present.
• Dan­marks Radio — Mozart Sym­phonies Feed Web Site
  • For the cel­e­bra­tion of Mozart’s 250th anniver­sary, Den­mark radio offered pod­casts of nine Mozart sym­phonies by the Dan­ish Radio Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra. Since the web site is in Dan­ish, your best bet is to access these high qual­i­ty MP3’s through the feed.
• Deutsche Welle
  • Beethoven­fest iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Beethoven’s most famous sym­phonies per­formed by excel­lent young orches­tras and new com­po­si­tions by award-win­ning com­posers.
  • Clas­si­cal Mas­ter­pieces iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Six mas­ter com­posers, six sym­phonies, a star con­duc­tor and a lead­ing orches­tra are the main ingre­di­ents of this remark­able musi­cal feast.
• New Clas­si­cal Tracks with Julie Amach­er iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Host Julie Amach­er pro­vides an in-depth explo­ration of a new clas­si­cal music release each week.
• Nax­os Clas­si­cal Music Spot­light iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A lead­ing clas­si­cal music label looks at new releas­es, as well as the per­form­ers and com­posers who make Nax­os’ record­ings.
• NPR Music iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Reviews, musi­cian inter­views, live record­ings from Morn­ing Edi­tion, All Things Con­sid­ered, and oth­er NPR pro­grams.
• Radio Swe­den: Mozart iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Swedish Radio has launched a Mozart Pod­cast to cel­e­brate Mozart’s 250th birth­day. They’ve been pod­cast­ing their own record­ings from the 1940–1950s of Mozart’s operas.
• The Con­cert iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and more from the Isabel­la Stew­art Gard­ner muse­um in Boston.
• The Music of Mas­ter­works iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Sony BMG Mas­ter­works pro­vides pod­casts fea­tur­ing inter­views with artists and upcom­ing releas­es.
• Wag­n­er Operas Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Fea­tures, among oth­er things, per­for­mances from the Bayreuth Fes­ti­val.

Jazz

• Bend­ing Cor­ners Feed Web Site
  • Bend­ing­Corners explores the groove with­in: acid jazz, afro-beat, bop, cool jazz, cos­mic jazz, dub, down­tem­po, elec­tro-jazz, fusion, future jazz, groove jazz, jaz­za­tron­ic, jazz dance, jazz-funk, jazz-rock, kozmi­groov, modal, phu­sion, pro­gres­sive, mod­ern, nu-jazz, soul-jazz, spir­i­tu­al, and world.
    
• Brook­lyn Jazz Under­ground iTunes Web Site Blog
  • A pod­cast look­ing at the Brook­lyn jazz scene. Part music, part inter­view.
• Chris­t­ian McBride Pod­casts iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Talks with and pefor­mances by bassist Chris­t­ian McBride. Includes some video clips.
• Detroit Jazz Stage iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A month­ly pod­cast fea­tur­ing the best in the Detroit jazz scene.
• In the Groove, Jazz and Beyond iTunes Feed Web Site
  • From Jazz mas­ters of past and present to emerg­ing new artists per­form­ing hard-bop jazz and fusion. Fea­tur­ing Inde­pen­dent Jazz artists from around the world. A pop­u­lar pod­cast.
• Jazz Cor­ner Innerviews Feed Web Site
  • Jazzcorner.com innerviews are vignettes with insight­ful com­men­tary, inter­est­ing sound bites and lots of great music with great jazz mas­ters and up and com­ing musi­cians. Each pod­cast ranges in time from 4 min­utes to more than an hour.
• Jazz in Chica­go iTunes Web Site
  • Inter­views and infor­ma­tion about the jazz scene in Chica­go.
• Jazz Pod­cast from Mag­natune iTunes Feed Web Site
  • 60 min­utes of straight, high qual­i­ty jazz.
• NPR Piano Jazz Shorts iTunes Feed Web Site
  • For more than twen­ty-five years, pianist Mar­i­an McPart­land has wel­comed a stel­lar line-up of jazz artists for con­ver­sa­tion and impro­vi­sa­tion on her Peabody Award-win­ning pro­gram. Piano Jazz show­cas­es both acclaimed artists and up-and-com­ing per­form­ers.
• Pat Methe­ny — The Song X Podu­men­tary iTunes Web Site
  • Gui­tarist Pat Methe­ny explores his influ­ences, record­ings, music and more on this inti­mate pod­cast series.
• Port­land Jazz Jams Pod­show iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Live jazz jams, inter­views with great play­ers, and instruc­tion­al mate­ri­als, all com­ing out of the Port­land jazz scene.
• Son­ny Rollins Pod­cast iTunes Web Site
  • A 12-part video pod­cast series to be released in month­ly install­ments. It intro­duces Son­ny Rollins, a major Amer­i­can jazz fig­ure, to new lis­ten­ers.
• Swing is in the Air iTunes Web Site
  • Although swing is some­thing of a focus here, this pod­cast com­ing out of Cana­da also looks at oth­er jazz forms.
• The Jazz Suite Feed Web Site
  • This is a pod­cast ded­i­cat­ed to Jazz played by inde­pen­dent and indie artists that the major music labels have missed.
• The Night Pas­sage Jazz Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
  • An Eng­lish-lan­guage pod­cast com­ing out of Rome, Italy.
• The Tra­neu­men­tary iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A series of pod­casts fea­tur­ing the work of the jazz great, John Coltrane.

Rock

• Beat­legs Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Fea­tures rare inter­views or behind the scenes clips, fol­lowed by a rare out­take or live per­for­mance that few have heard before.
• Bea­t­les Minute iTunes Feed Web Site
  • A pod­cast com­ing out of Philadel­phia that gives you short, dai­ly tid­bits about the band.
• Bono: The Rolling Stone Inter­view iTunes Feed Web Site
• Elvis Costel­lo: The First Ten Years iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Elvis Costel­lo looks back at the begin­ning of his music career.
• George Har­ri­son: Liv­ing in a Mate­r­i­al World iTunes
  • A look back at George Harrison’s 3rd solo album. Includes talks with artists who played on the album.
• John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Inter­view iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Con­duct­ed by Jann Wen­ner (the founder of Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine) this famous 1970 inter­view with John Lennon was con­duct­ed short­ly after The Bea­t­les’ bit­ter breakup. Run­ning over 3 hours, it is one of Lennon’s most exten­sive inter­views, touch­ing not just on the breakup, but also on art and pol­i­tics, drugs, Yoko, pri­mal ther­a­py and more.
• John Lennon: The Lost Lennon Tapes iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed by West­wood One in 1988, this pod­cast presents a col­lec­tion of Lennon’s pri­vate tapes — tapes that include ear­ly record­ings of The Bea­t­les, radio inter­views with John, demo tapes, chron­i­cles of the Dou­ble Fan­ta­sy record­ing ses­sions, and pri­vate moments at home.
• Pet Sounds 40th Anniver­sary Pod­cast iTunes Web Site
  • The Beach Boys look back at their album that is con­sis­tent­ly con­sid­ered their finest and an impor­tant one in the rock tra­di­tion. The pod­cast includes 15 tracks.
• Rolling Stone: Best New Bands (Video) iTunes
• The Beach Boys: The Warmth of the Sun iTunes Web Site
  • Nar­rat­ed by The Beach Boys them­selves, this pod­casts looks at the band’s artistry and com­plex lega­cy.

Also see our col­lec­tion of Mp3 Music Blogs.

• An Aquar­i­um Drunk­ard: Based in Los Ange­les, this eclec­tic audio blog “bridges the gap between con­tem­po­rary indie and vin­tage garage, psych-folk, coun­try, New Orleans funk, R&B, soul and every­thing that falls in between.”
• Brook­lyn Veg­an: Here you get a New York City-cen­tric, most­ly-music blog that focus­es on report­ing music news, live show reviews, tour dates, and, yes, MP3’s.
• Cacoph­o­nous: A clas­si­cal music MP3 blog.
• Chrome­waves: Along with the rumi­na­tions of a self-con­fessed indie rock geek, you get an “MP3 of the Week” that fea­tures a ran­dom or not-so-ran­dom cov­er song.
• Daytrot­ter: Gives you “exclu­sive, re-worked, alter­nate ver­sions of old songs and unre­leased tracks by some of your favorite bands and by a lot of your next favorite bands.”
• Des­ti­na­tion: Out: A jazz blog focus­ing on rare or out-of-print music. Typ­i­cal­ly pub­lish­es twice a week, and leaves songs avail­able for about two weeks.
• Dis­co­belle: A Swe­den-based music blog that posts sin­gle tracks and remix­es and occa­sion­al­ly exclu­sive mix­es from DJs all around the world.
• Done Wait­ing: Part film, part music with MP3s.
• Elbows: A meta col­lec­tion of great music blog posts, which col­lec­tive­ly pro­vides you a snap­shot of what’s going on in the new genre of audio/music blog­ging.
• Fluxblog: One of the old­est and most com­mon­ly cit­ed MP3 blogs, this site posts two MP3s every week­day along with more relat­ed infor­ma­tion.
• Goril­la vs. Bear: One of the big­gies worth check­ing out.
• I Guess I’m Float­ing: A good music blog with a good sprin­kling of MP3s.
• Idol­a­tor: Maybe this sum­ma­ry will help: “When the inter­net came, we over­threw the pasty white tastemak­ers, the duplic­i­tous music mar­keters and the man­u­fac­tured pop idols. And then they all came back. This is Idol­a­tor. We’re so dis­ap­point­ed.”
• La Blo­gotheque: A well-regard­ed French lan­guage MP3 blog.
• Large­heart­ed Boy: A “music blog fea­tur­ing dai­ly free and legal music down­loads as well as news from the worlds of music, lit­er­a­ture, and pop cul­ture.”
• Marathon Packs: Writes about and lets you lis­ten to inter­est­ing songs, to para­phrase the sites self-descrip­tion. Keeps audio files post­ed for two weeks.
• Moist­works: An audio blog start­ed in April 2004 (mean­ing it has a track record) that gets updat­ed Mon­day through Fri­day.
• Motel De Moka: A dai­ly blog post­ing eclec­tic playlists, includ­ing indie rock, acoustics and ambi­ent.
• My Old Ken­tucky Blog: What’s new and hot in indie rock, pop, folk and hip-hop.
• Noth­ing But Green Lights: An MP3 blog that keeps track of indie, elec­tro, folk & pop, all from the UK. The site only posts tracks that the inter­net is giv­ing away for free, or ones that have been grant­ed per­mis­sion.
• Prod­uct Shop NYC: Although not exclu­sive­ly an MP3 blog, you do get some MP3s worth your time here.
• Said the Gramo­phone: Launched in 2003, the site is among the first MP3 blogs and it offers a dai­ly sam­pler of “real­ly good songs,” although all songs are removed with­in a week or two of post­ing. The blog comes out of Cana­da.
• Six Eyes: An MP3 blog by Alan Williamson.
• Skat­ter Brain: A most­ly indiepop music blog.
• So Much Silence: MP3s a plen­ty.
• Soul Crates: Your home for soul MP3s.
• Stere­ogum: A pop­u­lar gos­sipy blog about the indie music scene. The site often posts MP3s of new music, plus offers record reviews, announces tour dates, and cov­ers music fes­ti­vals.
• The Hype Machine: The Hype Machine tracks and aggre­gates a vari­ety of MP3 blogs. Anoth­er meta approach.
• The Music Slut: A com­pre­hen­sive music blog with oodles of MP3s.
• Trrill: Anoth­er good clas­si­cal music audio blog.
• WFMU Beware of the Blog: An MP3 blog run by WFMU, an inde­pen­dent freeform radio sta­tion broad­cast­ing out of NYC.
• Who Needs Radio?: We believe in music, not mon­ey. We’re here to keep your ears alive.
• You Ain’t No Picas­so: A good music blog with a very nice blogroll and MP3s too.

When Charles Dickens Met Edgar Allan Poe

in History, Literature | November 10th, 2026

“There comes Poe with his raven,” wrote the poet James Rus­sell Low­ell in 1848, “like Barn­a­by Rudge, / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” Barn­a­by Rudge, as you may know, is a nov­el by Charles Dick­ens, pub­lished seri­al­ly in 1841. Set dur­ing the anti-Catholic Gor­don Riots of 1780, the book stands as Dick­ens’ first his­tor­i­cal nov­el and a pre­lude of sorts to A Tale of Two Cities. But what, you may won­der, does it have to do with Poe and “his raven”?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Poe reviewed the first four chap­ters of Dick­ens’ Barn­a­by Rudge for Graham’s Mag­a­zine, pre­dict­ing the end of the nov­el and find­ing out lat­er he was cor­rect when he reviewed it again upon com­ple­tion. He was par­tic­u­lar­ly tak­en with one char­ac­ter: a chat­ty raven named Grip who accom­pa­nies the sim­ple-mind­ed Barn­a­by. Poe described the bird as “intense­ly amus­ing,” points out Atlas Obscu­ra, and also wrote that Grip’s “croak­ing might have been prophet­i­cal­ly heard in the course of the dra­ma.”

It chanced the fol­low­ing year the two lit­er­ary greats would meet, when Poe learned of Dick­ens’ trip to the U.S.; he wrote to the nov­el­ist, and the two briefly exchanged let­ters (which you can read here). Along with Dick­ens on his six-month jour­ney were his wife Cather­ine, his chil­dren, and Grip, his pet raven. When the two writ­ers met in per­son, writes Lucin­da Hawk­sley at the BBC, Poe “was enchant­ed to dis­cov­er [Grip, the char­ac­ter] was based on Dickens’s own bird.”

Indeed Dick­ens’ raven, “who had an impres­sive vocab­u­lary,” inspired what Dick­ens called the “very queer char­ac­ter” in Barn­a­by Rudge, not only with his loqua­cious­ness, but also with his dis­tinc­tive­ly ornery per­son­al­i­ty. Dick­ens’ daugh­ter Mamie described the raven as “mis­chie­vous and impu­dent” for its habit of bit­ing the chil­dren and “dom­i­nat­ing” the family’s mas­tiff, such that the bird was ban­ished to the car­riage house.

Image cour­tesy of the Free Library of Philadel­phia.

But Dickens—who Jonathan Lethem calls the “great­est ani­mal nov­el­ist of all time”—loved the bird, so much that he wrote mov­ing­ly and humor­ous­ly of Grip’s death, and had him stuffed. (A not unusu­al prac­tice for Dick­ens; we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured a let­ter open­er Dick­ens had made from the paw of his cat, Bob.)  The remains of the his­tor­i­cal Grip now reside in the rare book sec­tion of the Free Library of Philadel­phia, “a stuffed raven” writes The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Ray­mond Lane, “about the size of a big cat.” (See Grip above.)

Of the lit­er­ary Grip’s influ­ence on Poe, Janine Pol­lack, head of the library’s rare books depart­ment, tells Philadel­phia mag­a­zine, “It is sort of a unique moment in lit­er­a­ture when these two great writ­ers are sort of think­ing about the same thing. You think about how much the two men were look­ing at each other’s work. It’s almost a col­lab­o­ra­tion with­out them real­iz­ing it.” But can we be sure that Dick­ens’ Grip, real and imag­ined, direct­ly inspired Poe’s “The Raven”? “Poe knew about it,” says his­to­ri­an Edward Pet­tit, “He wrote about it. And there’s a talk­ing raven in it. So the link seems fair­ly obvi­ous to me.”

Lane adduces some clear evi­dence of pas­sages in the nov­el that sound very much like Poe: “At the end of the fifth chap­ter,” for exam­ple, “Grip makes a noise and some­one asks, ‘What was that—him tap­ping at the door?’ Anoth­er char­ac­ter responds, ‘’Tis some­one knock­ing soft­ly at the shut­ter.’” Hawk­sley notes even more sim­i­lar­i­ties. “Although there is no con­crete proof,” she writes, “most Poe schol­ars are in agree­ment that the poet’s fas­ci­na­tion with Grip was the inspi­ra­tion for his 1845 poem The Raven.”

Where we often find sur­pris­ing lin­eages of influ­ence from author to author, it’s unusu­al that the con­nec­tions are so direct, so per­son­al, and so odd, as those between Poe, Dick­ens, and Grip the talk­ing raven. I’m espe­cial­ly struck by an irony in this sto­ry: Poe court­ed Dick­ens in 1842 “to impress the nov­el­ist,” writes Sid­ney Moss of South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty, “with his worth and ver­sa­til­i­ty as a crit­ic, poet, and writer of tales,” and with the aim of estab­lish­ing a lit­er­ary rep­u­ta­tion, and pub­lish­ing con­tracts, in Eng­land.

While Dick­ens seemed duly impressed, and will­ing to help, noth­ing com­mer­cial came of their exchange. Instead, Dick­ens and his raven inspired Poe to write the most famous poem of his life, “The Raven,” for which he will be remem­bered forever­more.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore an Online Archive of 2,100+ Rare Illus­tra­tions from Charles Dick­ens’ Nov­els

Charles Dick­ens Gave His Cat “Bob” a Sec­ond Life as a Let­ter Open­er

The His­toric Meet­ing Between Dick­ens and Dos­to­evsky Revealed as a Great Lit­er­ary Hoax

Édouard Manet Illus­trates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edi­tion Trans­lat­ed by Stephane Mal­lar­mé (1875)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

The Early Years of Electronic Pop: The Moog Craze, Psychedelic Experiments, and More

in History, Music, Technology | October 29th, 2026

There’s a decent chance you’ve heard at least a cou­ple of tracks from Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach. But when was the last time you put on Switched-On Rock, Switched-On Coun­try, Switched-On San­ta, or Switched-On Bacharach? More like­ly than not, you’ve nev­er even heard of those oth­er albums, which have noth­ing to do with Car­los and every­thing to do with the music-indus­try fad that her then-high-tech ren­di­tions of Bach set off in the late nine­teen-six­ties and ear­ly sev­en­ties. That’s the sub­ject of the new Band­splain­ing video above, which cov­ers the “awk­ward and glo­ri­ous” releas­es that con­sti­tut­ed the ini­tial waves of elec­tron­ic pop music.

Like so many cul­tur­al shifts, the rise of elec­tron­ic pop took place thanks to a tech­no­log­i­cal change. To be more spe­cif­ic, it was made pos­si­ble by the inven­tion of the volt­age-con­trolled, mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­er, itself depen­dent on two par­tic­u­lar inno­va­tions. Volt­age con­trol per­mit­ted the pitch of the sounds being gen­er­at­ed to be select­ed with a piano-style key­board, a slide rib­bon, a sequencer, or any oth­er inter­face the cre­ator’s elec­tron­ics know-how would allow. In the con­text of syn­the­siz­ers, a mod­ule is “a lit­tle box with an input and an out­put that did one thing and one thing only, either mak­ing a wave­form or mod­i­fy­ing it some­how,” as Robert Moog once described it, adding that mul­ti­ple mod­ules could be con­nect­ed togeth­er with cables.

If the name Moog sounds famil­iar, that’s because the lines of syn­the­siz­ers that bear it changed music for­ev­er. In fact, Car­los used an ear­ly Moog mod­el to record Switched-On Bach, hav­ing cus­tom-built it in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the inven­tor him­self. Though the machine set up behind the Bach imper­son­ator on that album’s cov­er may look unwieldy today, it rep­re­sent­ed a major improve­ment in con­ve­nience over the room-fill­ing, musi­cal­ly unin­tu­itive behe­moths pre­vi­ous­ly acces­si­ble only at cer­tain uni­ver­si­ties and cor­po­rate R&D depart­ments. So did the syn­the­siz­er invent­ed by Don Buch­la on the west coast, at about the same time Moog was build­ing his on the east coast, though each man’s design expressed a dif­fer­ent vision of how elec­tron­ic instru­ments would adapt to music, or vice ver­sa.

Indeed, up through at least the first few years of the sev­en­ties, it would’ve been impos­si­ble to say how or whether elec­tron­ic sounds would find their place in main­stream records. The emer­gence of home hi-fi cul­ture cre­at­ed a mar­ket for swing­ing “space age pop” by the likes of Les Bax­ter, Dick Hyman, and Juan Gar­cia Esquiv­el, the sub­ject of Band­splain­ing’s pre­vi­ous video. This one high­lights such releas­es as Richard Hay­man’s Gen­uine Elec­tric Latin Love Machine and Ger­shon Kings­ley’s Music to Moog By, whose track “Pop­corn” would become a world­wide hit when re-record­ed by Hot But­ter in 1972, but not before the space-age com­pos­er Hyman got in on the action. “The Mino­taur,” his piece of hyp­not­ic psy­che­delia with an Indi­an drone and Greek melody, reached #38 on the Hot 100 57 years ago — and today, remains a thrilling eight-and-a-half-minute ride down one of the many roads elec­tron­ic pop music did­n’t take.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Hear Glenn Gould Cel­e­brate the Moog Syn­the­siz­er & Wendy Car­los’ Pio­neer­ing Album Switched-On Bach (1968)

What is Elec­tron­ic Music?: Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Watch Com­pos­er Wendy Car­los Demo an Orig­i­nal Moog Syn­the­siz­er (1989)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Inside the Making of the Sagrada Família, Barcelona’s 144-Year Megaproject

in Architecture, History, Religion | October 28th, 2026

To get a sense of Sagra­da Famíli­a’s pop­u­lar­i­ty with YouTu­bers, you have only to take a look at the relat­ed Open Cul­ture posts linked below. As will hard­ly escape your atten­tion, most sub­jects that con­sis­tent­ly draw the atten­tion of the GoPro class are not nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Catholic church­es. But Antoni Gaudí’s mas­ter­piece, whose con­struc­tion alone has sur­vived him by a cen­tu­ry now, tran­scends many bound­aries of intel­lec­tu­al and cul­tur­al inter­est: his­to­ry chan­nels fea­ture it, trav­el chan­nels fea­ture it, reli­gious chan­nels fea­ture it, and, of course, archi­tec­ture chan­nels fea­ture it. Most recent­ly, Sagra­da Família has appeared on The B1M, which is all about con­struc­tion — the more ambi­tious, the bet­ter.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly post­ed B1M videos on the Flat­iron Build­ing, the Guggen­heim Muse­um Bil­bao, the extrater­res­tri­al­ly curv­ing work of Zaha Hadid, and every gen­er­a­tion of New York sky­scraper. That selec­tion only hints at the range of struc­tures to which the chan­nel’s cre­ator Fred Mills has paid close atten­tion, and yet it’s Sagra­da Família that puts him at a loss. “There’s parts of this build­ing where you can’t help but describe what you’re see­ing,” he says as he stands in its stained glass-illu­mi­nat­ed cen­tral nave. “There’s oth­er moments where you don’t have the words; it’s just emo­tion.” Enter­ing it feels, as he describes it, “less like you’re stand­ing inside a build­ing, and more like you’ve been trans­port­ed to the thresh­old of heav­en itself.”

How does Sagra­da Família cre­ate this expe­ri­ence for its vis­i­tors, even in its incom­plete state? Some will cred­it divine inspi­ra­tion; oth­ers, Gaudí’s sheer archi­tec­tur­al genius. Mills seeks out more con­crete forms of expla­na­tion, right down to the very blocks of stone used to build its tow­ers. Grant­ed much more access than ordi­nary tourists, who now come at a rate of about 1,500 per hour, he goes all the way up to see the mas­sive cross assem­bled on the church’s pin­na­cle, and all the way down to the base­ment work­shop where intri­cate mod­els test the myr­i­ad pos­si­ble ways to real­ize Gaudí’s vision. For when he died in 1926, hav­ing been hit by a tram, the plans he left behind did­n’t exact­ly explain all the details about how to fin­ish what resem­bled no oth­er build­ing ever erect­ed, reli­gious or oth­er­wise.

As Mills points out, sub­se­quent­ly devel­oped tech­nolo­gies have helped keep Sagra­da Famíli­a’s now 144-year-long con­struc­tion pro­ceed­ing apace. And though great cel­e­bra­tion attend­ed the top­ping-out of its cen­tral tow­er high above the streets of Barcelona this past Feb­ru­ary, more work remains to be done. Com­plet­ing its inte­ri­or, roofs, and side chapels, as well as the grand façade with its main entrance, should take anoth­er decade, depend­ing on how the rel­e­vant dis­putes involv­ing local res­i­dents and the city coun­cil play out. Still, it seems like­ly indeed that Sagra­da Família will final­ly be fin­ished with­in our life­times, which makes for the kind of dra­ma that will keep attract­ing both large- and small-time doc­u­men­tar­i­ans. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to see any­thing else quite like it,” Mills says, which hints at anoth­er rea­son for all the con­tent-cre­ator fas­ci­na­tion: though it may well be com­plet­ed in our age, Sagra­da Família could hard­ly be less of our age.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of Sagra­da Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Auda­cious Church That’s Been Under Con­struc­tion for 142 Years

The Incred­i­ble Engi­neer­ing of Anto­nio Gaudí’s Sagra­da Famil­ia, the 137 Year Con­struc­tion Project

The Japan­ese Sculp­tor Who Ded­i­cat­ed His Life to Fin­ish­ing Gaudí’s Mag­num Opus, the Sagra­da Família

The Longest Con­struc­tion Projects in His­to­ry: Why Sagra­da Família, the Milan Duo­mo, Greek Tem­ples & Oth­er Famous Struc­tures Took Gen­er­a­tions to Com­plete

How Design­ing Build­ings Upside-Down Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture, Mak­ing Pos­si­ble St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, Sagra­da Família & More

LEGO Lets You Build Gaudí’s Sagra­da Família in Its Largest Set Ever

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)

in Art, Science | October 28th, 2026

Maybe it’s the clois­tered headi­ness of Rene Descartes, or the rig­or­ous aus­ter­i­ty of Isaac New­ton; maybe it’s all the leath­ern breech­es, gray waist­coats, sal­low faces, and pow­dered wigs… but we tend not to asso­ciate Enlight­en­ment Europe with an explo­sion of col­or the­o­ry. Yet philoso­phers of the late 17th and 18th cen­turies were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a trea­tise on optics, as did New­ton.

New­ton first described in his 1672 paper the “rev­o­lu­tion­ary new the­o­ry of light and colour,” the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Whip­ple Library writes, “in which he claimed that exper­i­ments with prisms proved that white light was com­prised of light of sev­en dis­tinct colours.” Sci­en­tists debat­ed Newton’s the­o­ry “well into the 19th cen­tu­ry.”

One ear­ly oppo­nent famous­ly illus­trat­ed his rebut­tal. Poet, writer, and sci­en­tist Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe pub­lished The­o­ry of Col­ors (see here), with its care­ful­ly hand-drawn and col­ored dia­grams and wheels, in 1810. From New­ton’s time onward, col­or the­o­rists elab­o­rat­ed pre­vail­ing con­cepts with col­or wheels, the first attrib­uted to New­ton in 1704 (and drawn in black and white, above).

Newton’s wheel “arranged red, orange, yel­low, green, blue, indi­go, and vio­let into a nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion on a rotat­ing disk.” A few years lat­er, two col­or circles—one with 7 col­ors and anoth­er with 12—appeared in a paint­ing man­u­al attrib­uted to Claude Boutet (top), based on Newton’s the­o­ries. Artists, chemists, map­mak­ers, poets, even ento­mol­o­gists… every­one seemed to have a pet the­o­ry of col­or, gen­er­al­ly accom­pa­nied by elab­o­rate col­ored charts and dia­grams.

The col­or wheel was one among many forms—which often pre­sent­ed con­trast­ing the­o­ries, like that of Jacques-Fabi­en Gau­ti­er, who argued that black and white were pri­ma­ry col­ors. But the wheel, and Newton’s basic ideas about it, have endured almost unchanged. The wheel fur­ther up (third one from top) by British ento­mol­o­gist Moses Har­ris from 1766 shows Newton’s 7‑color scheme sim­pli­fied to the 6 pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary col­ors we usu­al­ly see, arranged in the com­ple­men­tary and anal­o­gous scheme, with ter­tiary gra­da­tions between them. Anoth­er ento­mol­o­gist, Ignaz Schif­fer­müller, drew the 12-col­or wheel right above.

Col­or is always rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Newton’s orig­i­nal wheel includ­ed “musi­cal notes cor­re­lat­ed with col­or.” By the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry, col­or the­o­ry had become increas­ing­ly tied to psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries and typolo­gies, as in the wheel above, the “rose of tem­pera­ments,” made by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in 1799 to illus­trate “human occu­pa­tions and char­ac­ter traits,” the Pub­lic Domain Review notes, includ­ing “tyrants, heroes, adven­tur­ers, hedo­nists, lovers, poets, pub­lic speak­ers, his­to­ri­ans, teach­ers, philoso­phers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into the four tem­pera­ments of humoral the­o­ry.

It’s a fair­ly short leap from these psy­cholo­gies of col­or to those used by adver­tis­ers and com­mer­cial design­ers in the 20th century—or from the artists and sci­en­tists’ col­or the­o­ries to abstract expres­sion­ism, the Bauhaus school, and the chemists and pho­tog­ra­phers who recre­at­ed the col­ors of the world on film. (Goethe’s col­or wheel, below, from The­o­ry of Col­ors, illus­trates his chap­ter on “Alle­gor­i­cal, sym­bol­ic, and mys­ti­cal use of colour.”) See more ear­ly col­or wheels, like Philipp Otto Runge’s 1810 Far­benkugel, as well as oth­er con­cep­tu­al col­or schemes, at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Woman Who The­o­rized Col­or: An Intro­duc­tion to Mary Gartside’s New The­o­ry of Colours (1808)

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete High-Res­o­lu­tion Dig­i­tal Scan

Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors: The 1810 Trea­tise That Inspired Kandin­sky & Ear­ly Abstract Paint­ing

How Tech­ni­col­or Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma with Sur­re­al, Elec­tric Col­ors & Changed How We See Our World

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

Sears Sold 75,000 DIY Mail Order Homes Between 1908 and 1939, and Transformed American Life

in Architecture, History | October 21st, 2026

Two of the books that most shaped Amer­i­can cul­ture both hap­pened to bear the nick­name “The Big Book.” While the sec­ond of these, the A.A. Man­u­al, pub­lished in 1939, changed the coun­try with 12-Step recov­ery groups, the first of these, the Sears Cat­a­log, trans­formed Amer­i­ca with mass con­sump­tion, offer­ing cus­tomers in every part of the coun­try access to mod­ern con­ve­niences and retail goods of all kinds at unheard of prices. Begin­ning in 1908, Sears start­ed sell­ing entire hous­es, in approx­i­mate­ly 25-ton kits trans­port­ed by rail­road, con­sist­ing of 30,000 pre-cut parts, plumb­ing and elec­tri­cal fix­tures, and up to 750 pounds of nails.

“In an era before com­mer­cial avi­a­tion and long-haul truck­ing,” Curbed mar­vels, “Sears, Roe­buck & Co. set up an oper­a­tion that would pack­age and ship more than 400 dif­fer­ent types of homes and build­ings to any­body who had the cash and access to a cat­a­log.”

They start­ed small, and just as they didn’t come up with the con­cept of the mail order cat­a­log, Sears didn’t invent the kit house, though they sug­gest as much in their telling of the sto­ry. Instead they may have tak­en the idea from anoth­er com­pa­ny called Aladdin. Aladdin hous­es have been for­got­ten, how­ev­er, and even Sears’ main com­peti­tor, Mont­gomery Ward, didn’t catch up until 1921 and only last­ed ten years in the kit house busi­ness.

Sears hous­es, on the oth­er hand, are cel­e­brat­ed and sought out as mod­els of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can home, and for good rea­son. Between 1908 and 1939, Sears sold 70–75,000 hous­es in 447 dif­fer­ent styles all over the coun­try. “From Crafts­man to Cape Cods, they offered a cus­tom home at bud­gets and sizes that could accom­mo­date any size fam­i­ly,” writes Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics.

These Sears homes weren’t cheap low-end hous­es. Many of them were built using the finest qual­i­ty build­ing mate­ri­als avail­able dur­ing that time. It’s not uncom­mon to find Sears homes today with oak floors, cypress sid­ing, and cedar shin­gles.

What’s even more extra­or­di­nary is that 50% of these were built by the home­own­ers them­selves, usu­al­ly, as in a barn-rais­ing, with the gen­er­ous help of fam­i­ly, friends, and neigh­bors. The oth­er half sold were built pro­fes­sion­al­ly. “Often,” writes Messy Nessy, “local builders and car­pen­try com­pa­nies pur­chased homes from Sears to build as mod­el homes and mar­ket their ser­vices to poten­tial cus­tomers.”

These hous­es could have a sig­nif­i­cant effect on the char­ac­ter of a neigh­bor­hood. Not only could poten­tial buy­ers see first­hand, and par­tic­i­pate in, the con­struc­tion. They could also order the same or a sim­i­lar mod­el, cus­tomize it, and even—as the com­pa­ny tells us in its own short his­to­ry of the “Sears Mod­ern Home”—design their own homes and “sub­mit the blue­prints to Sears, which would then ship off the appro­pri­ate pre­cut and fit­ted mate­ri­als.”

Sears sounds mod­est about its impact. The com­pa­ny writes it was not “an inno­v­a­tive home design­er” but instead “a very able fol­low­er of pop­u­lar home designs but with the added advan­tage of mod­i­fy­ing hous­es and hard­ware accord­ing to buy­er tastes.” Yet Sears hous­es aren’t beloved for their for­ward-look­ing designs, but for their stur­di­ness and vari­ety, as well as for their impact on “the emo­tion­al lives of rur­al folk,” as Messy Nessy puts it.

“The Sears mail-order cat­a­logues were sit­ting on kitchen coun­ter­tops inside mil­lions of Amer­i­can homes, allow­ing poten­tial home­own­ers to both visu­al­ize their new home and pur­chase it as eas­i­ly as they might have bought a new toast­er.” Build­ing a house required a lit­tle more invest­ment than plug­ging in a toast­er, and required a 75-page instruc­tion book, but that’s anoth­er part of why Sears house hunters are such a ded­i­cat­ed bunch, awestruck at each still-stand­ing mod­el they’re able to pho­to­graph and match up with its cat­a­log illus­tra­tions and floor plans.

In its first year of pro­duc­tion, 1908, Sears sold only one mod­el, num­ber 125, an Eight-Room Bun­ga­low Style House for $945, adver­tised as “the finest cot­tage ever con­struct­ed at a price less than $1500.” In 1918, the com­pa­ny moved from a num­ber­ing sys­tem to named mod­els, most of which sound like the names of cozy small towns and bed­room com­mu­ni­ties: Ade­line, Bel­mont, Maple­wood, Aval­on, Kil­bourne, Del Ray, Stone Ridge…. (See a full list of these mod­els at The Arts & Crafts Soci­ety web­site.)

In the years Sears sold hous­es, between 54 and 44 per­cent of Amer­i­cans lived in rur­al areas, and these con­sti­tut­ed Sears’ most loy­al cus­tomers, giv­en that the cat­a­log allowed them to pur­chase things they could buy nowhere else, includ­ing ten room colo­nial man­sions like The Mag­no­lia, avail­able from 1913 to 1922 for $6,488, or rough­ly $88,000—a steal if you can put in the work. This was the largest and most expen­sive mod­el the com­pa­ny offered, “a three-sto­ry, eight room neo-Geor­gian with a two-sto­ry columned por­ti­co, porte-cochere, and sleep­ing porch­es.” (Mint juleps and ser­vants’ quar­ters not includ­ed.)

Sears even­tu­al­ly offered three build qual­i­ties, Hon­or Bilt, Stan­dard Built, and Sim­plex Sec­tion­al. At the low­est end of the price and build spec­trum, the com­pa­ny notes, “Sim­plex hous­es were fre­quent­ly only a cou­ple of rooms and were ide­al for sum­mer cot­tages.” Many of its low-end and ear­ly mod­els did not include bath­rooms, and the com­pa­ny sold out­hous­es sep­a­rate­ly. But due to inno­v­a­tive con­struc­tion meth­ods, even the least expen­sive hous­es held up well.

Because the com­pa­ny lost most of the records after its kit house busi­ness fold­ed, it can be dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy a Sears house. And because even the “youngest of Sears homes,” Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics points out, is now going on nine decades old, they all require a sig­nif­i­cant amount of care.” The blog Kit House Hunters has found over 18,000 Sears hous­es still stand­ing across the coun­try, most of them in the North­east and Mid­west, where they sold best. (One com­mu­ni­ty in Elgin, IL has over 200 ver­i­fied Sears homes.)

In the video at the top, you can see a few of those well-built Sears hous­es still lived in today. The short How to Archi­tect video above points out that “Sears had a mas­sive impact on the busi­ness of home-build­ing, and… the busi­ness of pre-fab­ri­ca­tion, is alive and well today.” For a look at the vari­ety and intri­ca­cy of the Sears Mod­ern Home designs, see this Flickr gallery with over 80 images of cat­a­log pages, illus­trat­ed homes, and floor plans. And if you think you might be liv­ing in one of these hous­es, many of which have been grant­ed his­toric sta­tus, find out with this handy 9‑step guide for iden­ti­fy­ing a Sears Kit Home.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How the Sears Cat­a­log Dis­rupt­ed the Jim Crow South and Helped Give Birth to the Delta Blues & Rock and Roll

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Dog­house, His Small­est Archi­tec­tur­al Cre­ation (1956)

The Psy­chol­o­gy Behind Why Some Homes Feel Good But Most Don’t: Inte­ri­or Design Prin­ci­ples Explained

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pretty Good to Downright Great

in Music | October 20th, 2026

Smack in the mid­dle of Pink Floy­d’s clas­sic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many lis­ten­ers may hear as an extend­ed bridge between the two true cen­ter­pieces, “Time” and “Mon­ey.” But I’ve always thought of “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the album’s true cen­ter, a swirling, swing­ing, soul­ful prog-rock mas­ter­piece, car­ried to stratos­pher­ic heights by British singer Clare Tor­ry. The song’s word­less gospel vocal makes it an ecsta­t­ic, even hope­ful, tent pole sup­port­ing Dark Side’s bril­liant­ly cyn­i­cal songs about the banal­i­ty and injus­tice of mod­ern life.

“The Great Gig in the Sky,” that is to say, pro­vides much-need­ed emo­tion­al release in an album that can sound, writes Alex­is Petridis, “like one long sigh.” Yet if you know the sto­ry of Dark Side of the Moon and of Clare Torry’s defin­ing con­tri­bu­tion, you’ll know that her incred­i­ble soar­ing vocal was sheer hap­pen­stance, an impro­vi­sa­tion by a young singer brought in at the last minute by pro­duc­er Alan Parsons—and one who wasn’t a par­tic­u­lar fan of the band. (“If it had been The Kinks,” she remem­bered, “I’d have been over the moon.”)

Tor­ry reluc­tant­ly stepped into the stu­dio and asked the band, “Well, what do you want?” Basi­cal­ly, she says, “they had no idea.” An iso­lat­ed track from Alan Par­sons’ 1973 mix (above) strips the song down to piano, drums, slide gui­tar, and Torry’s voice. Ear­ly live ver­sions of the song in 1972 had fea­tured Bible read­ings and record­ed speech­es by con­ser­v­a­tive writer Mal­colm Mug­geridge; in the final ver­sion, these gave way to snip­pets of the band’s crew and friends answer­ing ques­tions about death.

When Tor­ry went into the vocal booth and put on the head­phones, she would have heard an even more stripped-down mix. Giv­en no oth­er instruc­tion than “we don’t want any words,” she decid­ed, “I have to pre­tend to be an instru­ment.”

Torry’s vocal is so dis­tinc­tive that she even­tu­al­ly won a set­tle­ment in 2005 for a co-song­writ­ing cred­it with Wright—an out­come some song­writ­ing experts agree was ful­ly jus­ti­fied since she essen­tial­ly cre­at­ed a new melody for the song. In the inter­view above, hear Tor­ry describe how she “had a lit­tle go” and, after some guid­ance from David Gilmour and a can of Heineken, casu­al­ly knocked out one of the most thrilling vocal per­for­mances in rock his­to­ry.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky” Played on the Theremin

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Edvard Munch’s Famous Paint­ing “The Scream” Ani­mat­ed to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Pri­mal Music

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

The Names of Nearly 4 Million Enslaved People in Former British Colonies Are Now Searchable Online, Helping Descendants Find Lost Ancestors

in History | October 13th, 2026

A few years ago, we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture the Freedmen’s Bureau Project data­base, which con­tains search­able infor­ma­tion on for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple in the Unit­ed States after its Civ­il War. With near­ly 1.8 mil­lion men, women, and chil­dren reg­is­tered there when it first opened to the pub­lic, it has remained a valu­able resource for many Amer­i­cans research­ing their own her­itage, not just descen­dants of for­mer slaves but of oth­er Civ­il War refugees as well. But of course, the U.S. was hard­ly the only coun­try where slav­ery exist­ed. Count­less peo­ple here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry have ances­tors who were enslaved in oth­er for­mer British colonies, and now they’ve got a por­tal through which to do genealog­i­cal search­es of their own.

Launched by a part­ner­ship between the geneal­o­gy com­pa­ny Ances­try and the Cen­tre for the Study of the Lega­cies of British Slav­ery at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, the online For­mer British Colonies Enslave­ment Reg­is­ters makes avail­able records on near­ly four mil­lion indi­vid­u­als enslaved between 1813 and 1840 in a host of coun­tries from the Bahamas to Mau­ri­tius to South Africa.

First cre­at­ed by the British gov­ern­ment dur­ing the process of abol­ish­ing the transat­lantic slave trade in 1807 — much as the Freedmen’s Bureau orga­nized its reg­istry of for­mer slaves dur­ing Recon­struc­tion under Abra­ham Lin­coln — the orig­i­nal papers con­tain not just their names and ages, but also mater­nal fam­i­ly con­nec­tions, phys­i­cal descrip­tions, and some­times details about their place of African ori­gin.

In the video above, geneal­o­gist and Ances­try Senior Sto­ry Pro­duc­er Nic­ka Sewell-Smith pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to the For­mer British Colonies Enslave­ment Reg­is­ters, which you can access here. If you’re curi­ous about whether your own ances­tors may appear in its records, you can search by details like name, approx­i­mate date, or loca­tion to nar­row down the poten­tial match­es. The mod­ern descen­dants of peo­ple enslaved in the 20 coun­tries cov­ered by the data­base by no means live exclu­sive­ly, or even pri­mar­i­ly, in those coun­tries or in Great Britain itself. More than two cen­turies lat­er, their descen­dants live all over the world, includ­ing in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Unit­ed States, lead­ing lives very dif­fer­ent from those of their enslaved ances­tors — but the recon­struc­tion of their fam­i­ly sto­ries has only just begun. Enter the data­base here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visu­al­ized in Two Min­utes: 10 Mil­lion Lives, 20,000 Voy­ages, Over 315 Years

The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.