The Hidden Years Music Archive is one of South Africa’s biggest popular music archives. Collected by David Marks, it documents South African alternative popular music from the late 1950s to the early 2000s. At the heart of this archive is material from the 3rd Ear Record Company, an independent record label established to record, promote and produce music that was not considered commercially viable, or seen as too political by the major record companies and the state-controlled broadcasting corporation. Marks recorded and collected wherever he went, and today this archive boasts an impressive collection of live music recordings, posters, photographs, programmes and tickets of music festivals, concerts and events in South Africa. This illustrated two-hour lecture will share the discoveries researchers on the project have made as they have sorted, catalogued and curated the Hidden Years Music Archive.
Dr Lizabé Lambrechts is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), Stellenbosch University. Her current research project is entitled: "Making accessible South Africa's unknown music history: sorting, cataloguing and curating the Hidden Years Music Archive". She holds a PhD in Musicology from Stellenbosch University on the subject of power and politics in music archives. Her current research is aimed at exploring this topic further, expanding it to include the relationship of the archive with notions of violence, loss, and wonder. Furthermore, she is pursuing the possibilities offered by exhibitions and curatorial projects for engagement with South African music, history and memory across a wide remit of cultures and disciplines.