Irish music has a history of being collected. There was O’Neill’s 1001. There is Jeremy Keith’s The Session, and now there’s Aisteach, the “Avant Garde Archive of Ireland – a repository and archive for historical documents, recordings, materials and ephemera relating to avant-garde artistic projects in Ireland since the 19th Century.”
A favourite, after a quick sample of those parts of the archive that have already been digitised, is the 1910 wax cylinder recording of a performance by Ultan O’Farrell – an early exponent of drone music cited as an influence on Pauline Oliveros.
The site does however come with a disclaimer.