Good morning everyone,

I hope you have had a good week and that you are looking forward to a newsletter of music and bravery and archiving. Just writing those words feels good so let's get stuck in.

We start with a friend and subscriber link about the work of Sandy Stone for Olivia Records in the 1970s. In case you, like me, didn't know, Olivia Records was a lesbian separatist record label and, later, successful cruise line. I am prepared to bet that even in the present Trying Times For The Cruise Industry they are faring better than 99% of record labels founded in the 1970s. The pullquote below from this long, wide ranging and fascinating interview meets Sandy Stone at her pre Olivia business – a stereo repair shop for women:

We became extremely popular and we became more, perhaps, of a center for women than I had ever expected. I mean, we were a store with a couch in it; people would sit and schmooze and drop off things to be repaired […] I was doing that one day, and I looked up from whatever the hell I was doing, and there were two women in the front of the store looking at me, and I said, “Can I help you?” and they said, “We’re from Olivia Records, and we hear that you’re a recording engineer. We’re looking for a woman to engineer some music for us. Would you like to try doing that?”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmd5k5/sandy-stone-biography-transgender-history

If you want to know more about the history of Olivia itself – including a bit of cruise ship stuff, although the focus here is on the music – I enjoyed this article about archiving and cataloguing the label's contribution to culture:

On the 45th anniversary of Olivia’s founding, conversations about preserving both concert tour and voyage highlights have taken on a new urgency too. While all the original collective members and artists and most of the original distributors, producers and fans are still living, it’s crucial to preserve their stories now. Olivia’s material culture is secure—with many original albums still shrink-wrapped— but full oral histories and narrative memoirs are needed to pass along this torch of music activism.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-should-we-archive-soundtrack-1970s-feminism-180968637/

This is a track from this year but the opening feels very much of a piece with the openness to the world that we've just been reading about. Here's Ahya Simone, talking about bravery and mortality and then performing her song Frostbite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6khqC_g49A

Mega love always,

Alex.