6 Great Concerts to hear on the Internet Live Music Archive

The Internet Archive is one of the last best places in what’s become a digital wasteland. It’s a refuge for those exhausted of the ongoing enshittification of every online space—a virtual library (quite literally, since you can check out books), a journalistic record, an audio-visual depository, and a source of important if sometimes long-forgotten media. It’s also free.

In years past I frequently used the Archive’s Wayback Machine, which maintains an archive of long-dead web pages, but it has another feature that’s well worth diving into: the Live Music Archive. It’s exactly what it sounds like, an extensive collection of fan-recorded, often high quality live sets from the 1960s to the present day. Not surprisingly, the artist you’ll see most often is the Grateful Dead, which spawned its own subculture of show taping and trading that remains celebrated and active nearly 60 years after it began. But the list of artists with live sets available in the library extends to all corners of the spectrum, some you might expect (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard) and some that surprised even me (Mountain Goats at 474 shows and counting). There’s also a lot of Fugazi shows, which they’re steadily adding to Bandcamp.

There are, of course, limitations; a lot of bands don’t allow their live sets to be made available for copyright reasons. So you can’t necessarily find just any old show here. And you might not, as I discovered, be able to find that life-changing show you attended when you were 18. (Came close, though!) But there’s more than enough to keep you busy for years if you want it to. With that said, I picked a few of my favorites, but it’s worth diving into the massive catalog to see what gems you can find.

Low – Great Hall, Toronto, 2018-11-06

I caught one of the final shows of Low’s HEY WHAT tour, less than a year before Mimi Parker’s death. And while that makes it more heartbreaking in hindsight, I nonetheless feel fortunate in being able to see one of my favorite bands while they were still together. I do, however, partially regret not going to see them in Tijuana from their Double Negative tour back in 2018. Yet this live set from the same tour, recorded in Toronto, has an even longer and more diverse setlist. The recording is pretty solid—not perfect, but the clarity of sound is enough that nothing gets buried in the mix. It’s also interesting to hear the variations in live arrangements from their studio counterparts; opener “Quorum,” for instance, sounds more like a conventional guitar-bass-drums Low arrangement, while “Dancing and Blood” carries more of the otherworldly ambient pop sound of the recorded version. There are myriad highlights here, however, like the ominous, 11-minute sprawl of “Do You Know How to Waltz?” or the eerie and mournful standout from their debut I Could Live in Hope, “Lazy.” Still, it’s in the relative quiet of a song like “Dancing and Fire” in which we hear Low’s superpower, creating something breathtaking and devastating from only the sparsest of elements.

Autechre – Live at Flex 1996-02-15

IDM duo Autechre have a pretty ample live archive as it is, having released over 50 of their own live shows between 2015 and 2024. But this early gem from their Tri repetae days leans hard into the noise and static-laden beats of that industrial braindance masterpiece, turning frantic, distorted beat sputter into something like an actual party mix, with occasionally recognizable standouts from their catalog (“Clipper,” “Eutow” etc.). “Intelligent” dance music or not, this set makes a convincing case that it’s dance music nonetheless.

The Microphones – Live at Maxwell’s on 2002-09-08

Phil Elverum’s been touring and recording as Mount Eerie for the better part of two decades, so for those of us who didn’t catch this early part of his career in person, it’s fascinating to catch a glimpse of The Microphones as an active entity. Not that the overall approach is much different—this higher-fidelity set captured at Maxwell’s is just slightly more elaborate than a solo performance (sounds like a duo?), but a setlist full of songs from The Glow Pt. 2 is reason enough to tune in, particularly “The Moon,” which even in this stripped-down take, sounds utterly mesmerizing.

Magnolia Electric Co. – Planta Baja, 2003-10-15

I’ve written a lot about Jason Molina’s music over the years, so this probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that I’d include Magnolia Electric Co. here, but it’s worth noting that there’s a pretty rich backlog of Magnolia and Songs: Ohia live recordings on the Archive, which is significant for someone like me, who’d pretty easily chase down Molina live albums like they were Dick’s Picks. And this is one that I’d easily buy if it were ever mastered for and pressed on vinyl. Captured in 2003, less than a year after the release of Magnolia Electric Co., it finds the group already transitioning into the next phase, performing songs like “The Dark Don’t Hide It,” “Nashville Moon” and “Don’t This Look Like the Dark” well before they were captured in the studio. Some of the most haunting moments are the most familiar, however, like the 10-minute sprawl of opener “Almost Was Good Enough,” or a version of the 2002 highlight “Steve Albini’s Blues” that draws it out into a “Planet Caravan”-like dirge. That it doesn’t even feature their most famous song, “Farewell Transmission,” is immaterial (and there are plenty on the archive that do, so don’t despair!). I’m just thankful someone had the foresight to capture this kind of magic as it was happening.

Spoon – Live at Gothic Theater on 2005-06-14

I’ve seen Spoon a bunch of times over the past 25 years. How many? Hard to say—there was the All Tomorrow’s Parties show, the one at a radio station Christmas show with Phoenix and Vampire Weekend, a couple of club/theater shows… enough to know it’s worth seeing them again the next time. This set captured during their Gimme Fiction tour drives that point home. While the mix is a little weird (Britt Daniel’s vocals sound a bit hollow), the overall sound quality is great and, more importantly, the band is just on. While my favorite songs are often the subtler ones (“Chicago at Night,” here, being one of them), there’s no shortage of absolute rippers on offer, like “Jonathan Fisk,” “The Fitted Shirt,” or “Take a Walk.” Take note that the nine-minute “My Mathematical Mind” (another highlight) is slightly misleading; four of those minutes are the crowd clamoring for an encore. But after a set that strong, you would be too.

Elliott Smith – Live at Roseland Theatre on 2000-11-10

The Elliott Smith collection on Archive is fairly ample, so much so that I had hoped one of the handful of shows I saw back in college—particularly his performance at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on his Figure 8 tour with a hard-rocking version of “Needle in the Hay” and a cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”—would be among them. While that show itself isn’t, another one from just a couple days earlier on the same tour, in Portland, is, and the setlist and sound is close enough to call it a win. It’s unusually raw and loud for what you might expect from Smith, whose records were often centered around his hushed vocals and acoustic guitar, but he and his band rip through his early Kill Rock Stars gems like “Hay” and “Clementine” as proper rock songs. (Side note: This, plus the recording of “Christian Brothers” on the new reissue of Heatmiser’s Mic City Sons, suggests the possibility of an Electric Nebraska-style version of his self-titled 1995 album.) It’s not a perfect show by any means—it’s raw, his voice strains a bit (it was close to the end of the tour, that’ll happen!), but it’s still enough to take me back to one of the best sets of live music I ever experienced.

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