Avant garde and Outsider sounds and visions

Two brilliant sites that could keep you engrossed for hours:

• WFMU's Beware of the Blog

is the most amazing collection of obscure, avant-garde and down-right weird, whether it be 37 cover versions of Stairway To Heaven (almost all universally bad - although I have a soft spot for the cheesey lounge-gore versions from Pardon Me Boys and Richard Cheese "scoobee-dooobee-dooo...."), the anti-Baez strumming humming anti-communist folkie Janet Greene or Jesus Christ superstar in Japanese. There really is too much to take in, all of it pretty extra-ordinary in a Songs-In-The-Key-Of-Z sort-a-way (also now available in a bargain price 2CD package).

and then, for the more serious avant amongst us, there is

• UbuWeb

a phenomenal collection of audio and video from the 20th century avant-garde, such as William Burroughs' cut up movies, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter plays, a range of short fluxus films from the likes of Yoko Ono and John Cale, Abbie Hoffman's Wake up America LP, Jean Genet poetry, a Derek Bailey interview, Susan Sontag on the aesthetics of silence

Phenomenal.