About the Other Minds Archives

Other Minds' archives have been growing steadily since the inaugural Other Minds Festival in 1993. Along with the organization's documented concert history, Other Minds became a steward for other media collections over the years after embarking on a long term preservation project that began in 2000 with the acquisition of the KPFA-FM Music Department collection.

KPFA-FM Radio in Berkeley, California, a part of the Pacifica Foundation's radio network, was founded in 1949 by Lewis Hill, a journalist and poet who, along with a group of radio professionals, wanted "not only to disseminate the diversity of thought and art produced by this and other societies, but to make possible a way of life for individuals of artistic and intellectual abilities to contribute to the culture themselves." To promote this vision, KPFA capitalized the enterprise not through commercial funding, but through listener sponsorship, a model now imitated throughout the U.S. Significantly, KPFA quickly carved out an international reputation in music programming.

A fuller history of the KPFA Music Department led by composers, music critics, and music librarians exclusively from 1949-1992, can be understood in this article written by composer Charles Amirkhanian, who served as KPFA's Music Director for 23 years before co-founding Other Minds along with film producer and art gallerist Jim Newman. [Read more about Other Minds' history here.]

OM has to this day continued its efforts in the archiving and preservation of audiovisual material in our collections, placing emphasis on public access by making material available through this website and other institutional portals. In 2016, OM’s physical archives were deposited with Special Collections at the University of Santa Cruz's McHenry Library.