A brief summary of the impact made by a group of audio anarchist propagandists.
A number of years ago when I was finishing up University I got curious about the many strands of left wing politics and the multitude of `isms. So I started exploring, buying cheap books on the history of revolts, essays and political texts. For anarchism an early source of information was a website called Audio Anarchy. Sadly Audio Anarchy has recently gone offline, the domain has expired and the links to the site and the downloads section now no longer work. Its not really surprising I have Audio Anarchy on my podcast apps and the last update was in 2006, so the people behind it gave it a lot of support. Maybe it'll be restored but I don't hold out hope. Fortunately though I was able to download all the recorded audio files via the wayback machine.
Audio Anarchy is a project for transcribing anarchist books into audio format.
Hopefully, this can help make anarchist texts and ideas more accessable. Beyond the obvious appeal for people who don't like to read (or don't have time to read in this busy on-the-go world), hearing a book read aloud can also be enjoyable.
The Audio Anarchy project is organized in a distributed way. Instead of having a single person or group of people read an entire book, different people read separate chapters to distribute the work load. Ideally, this site will do more to help facilitate that kind of organization in the future.
The group made seven albums, a selection of essays by Emma Goldman, a collection of short speeches called the Anarchist tension by Alfredo Bonanno, Against the Logic of Submission by Wolfi Landstreicher, Thoughts on Society of the Spectacle -which isn't a direct reading its a reading of a selection of passages from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle with the readers explaining what they read and giving some practical examples- Days of War, Nights of Love a publication by the American anarchist group Crimethinc. A selection of Anti work essays from several authors including George Woodcock, and the groups last production was Fredy Perlman's novel Letters of Insurgents.
They also developed a side project called Radio Anarchy, which was four original recordings by the group on several subjects, the history of the concept of property, a biographical recounting of Hitchhiking through the USA, a critique of democracy and technology.
Quite an impressive list to be honest, and quite useful. I made several of them into videos for YouTube and kept meaning to get around to the rest of them, its a good thing I did because it meant I kept checking on the site every once in a while.
The site lasted from 2002 until the winter of 2018, in its sixteen years of existence it had over a million overall downloads, but that number doesn't account for downloads via the torrents, Days of War Nights of Love was still active when I checked and I was able to kickstart several others with the audio files I downloaded, unfortunately some of the torrents used different version so unless another seed logs on they won't work. The group also sold CD's of their recordings so their reach extended even further.
Here's the files:
The master folder Media Fire (https://www.mediafire.com/#y53rhbmrad5rb)
Google doc folder
The Anarchist Tension
Thoughts on Society of the Spectacle
Anti Work Essays
Essays by Emma Goldman
Against the Logic of Submission
Days of War Nights of Love
Letters of Insurgents
Radio Anarchy
Comments
Reddebrek, thanks a lot for
Reddebrek, thanks a lot for posting this. I just listened to The Anarchist Tension. Great stuff.
No problem mate, it was a
No problem mate, it was a good site, I especially liked The one they did on Society of the Spectacle, really helped me understand the book.
I was meaning to make videos about the rest of them and listen to the massive Letters of Insurgents eventually, but with the site being on line for so long I guess I took it for granted. Luckily I believe I managed to grab the files so with some sharing they should be around for awhile longer.
Letters of Insurgents was
Letters of Insurgents was great. I listened to their version when I was in college and several passages made me cry (with joy and sorrow)
Nice one! Also, if you're
Nice one!
Also, if you're not aware there is this great project which is still live, seems to have launched about a year ago. They have:
How non violence protects the state,
The conquest of bread,
Socialism from below,
and some a mix of other stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaO1QA8QL99_eb0XhJI2Fyw
dark_ether wrote: Nice one!
dark_ether
Oh it rings a bell, https://libcom.org/blog/introducing-audible-anarchist-03012018 lol
I'm actually one of its readers.
Hah, awesome. Can I ask a
Hah, awesome.
Can I ask a question, what sorta setup do you use for recording? Me and a couple of friends were interested in doing some audio recordings online, and since studio time isn't really viable for us we were looking at getting our own mic(s). Just don't wanna sacrafice audio quality, cuz its really irritating to try and listen to something if the audio is bad!
To be honest I just record
To be honest I just record using a fairly cheap headset mic, listen to the audio and do some simple clean up if there's any serious issues like background noises, then submit them to the groups audio engineer to work over. You're probably better off talking to him about the technical side.
dark_ether wrote: Hah,
dark_ether
we've got a decent quality USB microphone we could donate to you, if you're up for contributing your recordings to libcom
Hey, some good news, the site
Hey, some good news, the site http://audioanarchy.org/ has recently come back online, no new content though but the sites back up for a time at least.