Party like it's 198x!
December 1, 2015 3:25 AM   Subscribe

If you’re looking for a good way to spend the rest of your week, Archive.org has unearthed a gigantic collection of cassettes from the mid-80 into the mid-90s. According to their notes, the 30GB collection was saved from the archives of noise-arch.net (previously) and donated by former CKLN-FM radio host Myke Dyer in August 2009. Due to its size and obscurity, the collection hasn’t been properly notated but is said to include cassettes ranging from “tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials”. (via FACT)
posted by lmfsilva (22 comments total) 55 users marked this as a favorite
 
OK, my dad has a MASSIVE, MASSIVE collection of mixtapes from the 80s, maybe the 70s. Mostly pop, rock, disco. They're still around, though I'm not sure what quality they're in. Is there any way we can make use of this?
posted by divabat at 3:32 AM on December 1, 2015


Clicks on torrent link.

Commencify waititude!
posted by Devonian at 4:07 AM on December 1, 2015


Very cool. Sadly a browse/search interface to a database somewhere is really the only way for me to interact with this, but maybe one will come in the future.
posted by carter at 4:18 AM on December 1, 2015


Yeah, this is just a big dump from the Archive Team. I imagine, in time, it will be properly sorted and ingested by the Archive.
posted by timdiggerm at 6:02 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


They better have all those mixtapes of mine that were stolen out of my car back in '85, that's all I gotta say...
posted by Thorzdad at 6:21 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAH YA MAMA!

That's right, I said YA MAMA!

 
posted by Herodios at 6:53 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, this is currently not possible to enjoy without a lengthy/sizable download, and some subsequent unpacking and sorting. I have a feeling it will be worth it in the end, but it's not going to be the kind of thing a person can casually sample.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:15 AM on December 1, 2015


“tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials” - sounds like that special section in Tower Records in the SF Bay Area in that time period - mid-80 to mid-90 . Racks of cassettes in arty/alternative packaging. If you had the spare cash, you could take your chances and get an aural surprise. I still have a box full of these. Lots of stuff from local label Auricular Records.
posted by King Sky Prawn at 7:36 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


I released a handful of cassettes back then (I recorded as Patience Worth), including 2 or 3 on Myke Dyer's John Doe Recordings label. I started by renting a 4-track machine and just went to work experimenting, eventually finishing with a collection of material I was happy with. I created the tape insert artwork using an image ripped from a magazine and Letraset, Xeroxed a bunch of copies and got 30 or so tapes duplicated, then started mailing them out to college radio stations and magazines. Dyer was doing a show at CKLN and contacted me, saying he'd like to release it on his label. I was beyond thrilled.

That cassette scene seems almost comical to me now, but it was so much fun. Everything happened via snail mail. DIY indeed.
posted by davebush at 8:26 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm adding this to favorites optimistically but there are five hours to go on the download.

Cassettes... I don't miss that medium at all even though I miss the physical cassettes and people's drawings and handwriting. The sound quality was so terrible!

But yes, I have copies of my band's cassette releases within a few feet of where I sit. I wonder if anything I did or anyone I know is on this dump? We'll see in... oh, 2 hours and 3 minutes!

(EDIT: bummer, now it's 11 hours...)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:01 AM on December 1, 2015


Also, my late friend Doug Walker had thousands of cassettes of rare unreleased live recordings - perhaps tens of thousands. I wonder what happened to them? Lots of Can, Hawkwind, Krautrock in general, prog, electronic...

Doug was well-connected, perhaps someone here knows what happened to them?
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:03 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Reviewer: Jason Scott - - December 1, 2015
Subject: Use the Original Site
This is Jason Scott, who originally backed up this collection of NOISE-ARCH. I don't understand why someone wrote an article saying "The Archive has this collection" - it was a straight-up grab into a .TAR file of a still-running site, hence why it's not been split up into a functioning set of items to listen and stream - the site is still up!

http://noise-arch.net/

posted by humboldt32 at 10:08 AM on December 1, 2015


I can't find any content at Noise-arch.net Am I missing something?
posted by OmieWise at 10:25 AM on December 1, 2015


Awesome mix
posted by Smedleyman at 12:32 PM on December 1, 2015


I can't find any content at Noise-arch.net Am I missing something?

I considered linking to it, but for some reason, it hit some uncanny valley between a legitimate, outdated site the author quit after a couple of unrelated posts, and a squatters' site with some content from the previous owner and some SEO words, waiting for the right moment to be sold off to a gambling site. I'm leaning heavily towards the second, but not enough to say "domain squatted" in the post.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:14 PM on December 1, 2015


I have a blazing fast connection at work and I am getting prospective DL times of 1-2 days. The archive servers themselves must be overloaded.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:55 PM on December 1, 2015


The site looks sorta squatted right now; here's the Wayback Machine crawl from 2013 that shows what it used to look like.
posted by Pronoiac at 3:06 PM on December 1, 2015


I agree that it looks squatted, but that's why I couldn't understand the Jason Scott comment quoted above.
posted by OmieWise at 5:32 PM on December 1, 2015


OmieWise: I dunno!

If you're interested, try a torrent client that can use decentralized tracking; the torrent trackers listed, like bt1.archive.org, don't seem to recognize this download. There are a few seeds.
posted by Pronoiac at 6:03 PM on December 1, 2015


I downloaded it overnight, but didn't have a chance to dig into it yet. It's made even huger by the fact that it's MP3. I'm not sure the bit rate, but 30 gigs is a lot of MP3 music!
posted by OmieWise at 6:13 AM on December 2, 2015


I downloaded it reasonably swiftly - was getting between 2 and 5 MB/s on my domestic 100Mbps, which is as good as it gets. I'll seed for a while, but it's swamping my 12 Mbps uplink, though, so the more the merrier...
posted by Devonian at 6:38 AM on December 2, 2015


Late to the party.. but the link in the OP now links through to a curated collection, with in-browser previews and no need to download 30 gigs wortha stuff :)

BY FAR my favorite thing I have dug up so far has been something called Radiante.. kinda dark-ish industrial pop with influences from all over the place. Don't even bother trying to dig up any further info on it though,, google has shown me precisely zero results about this artist/work. Well worth a listen in any case!!
posted by wats at 2:38 PM on December 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


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