Neil Young's 'archives' sounds... well... amazing

There's been loads of fuss for nigh on 10 years about Neil Young's 'Archives'. Was it going to be a boxset? A DVD set? What? People need answers... and now, looks like we've got 'em.

Basically, Neil Young has been threatening us with a 45 year career-spanning Archives project, which is now slated for release this Autumn through Warner Music. Via a webcasted morning session of the Sun Microsystem's JavaOne Conference in San Francisco (catchy eh? You see what we have to put up with to bring you the news), Young and Shakey films colleague L.A. Johnson unveiled some elements of the ongoing project.

The project will be based around an interactive “filing cabinet”, which means that fans will be able to play songs and access photographs, newspaper clippings and Young’s own memorabilia, while they listen to relevant tracks. You'll use an interactive timeline, thus, enabling you to focus on the bits of Young's back cat you like best. So, for example, you can listen to Harvest and see loads of clippings, tour posters et al. You'll probably get loads of demos too. Of course, this being such a huge project, it's nowhere near finished, as should Young find any more archive material to share, it will be enabled to automatically download to what will eventually be a collection of ten Blu-Ray discs.

Young said of the delay to the project, which has been in the planning stages for at least the last ten years, that it was technology's fault. He said "I thought DVD would be good enough, but you couldn't navigate around materials whilst listening to the music, and I thought that that's what my fans would want to do. Also we were defeated by technology with the sound. Now with Java you can listen in the best possible quality that we have today." He added that making and designing Volume One has "been very rewarding for me, but it's not finished! In fact, we're never done." The only limit to what the Archives will hold he says is storage and "how much your device can hold" but that as technology moves forward, storage space gets bigger and bigger.

Jesus wept. This could be the future... right now.