Good noight ta ye!

Yeah but we all know that from the "Cheesy Christian Album Covers" thread! :laughing:

You don't need to post Youtube videos. That's just what I've been doing for fun. If the **** you got isn't even on the internet then that just means you got a leg up.

I only wish I could share audio samples or non-existent album jackets. It's a bit dull to just prattle on about mysterious tracks no one has ever heard.

Okay - one artist for example as I've been playing their catalog all day in the Listening... thread.

I have over 2300 tracks by Underworld, one of the biggest names in progressive house and drum and bass for the last 36 years. A massive portion of these recordings are non-commercial and/or unreleased. (This of course is terribly common in the world of electronic music.)

My review of their latest album, Barbara Barbara We Face a Shining Future mentions an early edit of the album track, “Always Loved a Film”, (then dubbed “Silver Boots”) which was broadcast only once – on May 19th 2006 from the band’s Lemonworld Studio. I captured the live stream and to this day this expanded edit which differs significantly from the commercial cut remains one of my favorite selections from the band's history.

Of the 463 Underworld-related albums in my catalog, only 139 have been issued publically by the current tally on Discogs.com. I've carefully organized this library of rarities into a series of categorical primary folders including albums, compilations, demos prototypes and outtakes, DJ mixes, interview sessions, the Lemon Interupt (yes, misspelled) side project, the Book of Jam art series, official live albums, unofficial live albums, remixes, singles, EPs, solo and collaborative projects for each of the members, official soundtracks, unreleased soundtracks, and miscellanea.

To maintain proper archival standards, all releases are uniformly formatted and tagged with date prefixes of recording and release. Bitperfect FLAC is employed wherever possible, though a few selections like audio I extracted from a multimedia art project and from their early video installations as the Tomato art collective are offered in the low bitrate native to the original source. (It was the early days of the WWW and sound standards had not yet taken hold.)

If needed, I can export a directory tree of the library and publish it to a spreadsheet on Google Drive, but I hope this brief summary suffices to outline the scope of this particular collection.

So that I don't leave you empty handed, here's the first-ever recording by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of Underworld - a terrible one-off single recorded and mixed at Point Studios, London in 1979. A handful of copies were pressed, the album art by Karl himself, and were sold from the boot of his car around Cardiff... 16 years before "Born Slippy.NUXX."

The A side is "Teenage Teenage" b/w "I Just Can't Stand Cars." It's ****. And I need it in my life. Copies usually go for $300 - $350.

It will be mine.

Yes you do.

As for ISB, well the thing is that as long as the music is available (you can either listen to it online or (gasp!) buy it in physical form) then you're good. You don't have to post loads of information though: just a basic idea and then see if someone says "Oh yeah I listen to that all the time" or somesuch.

But anyone who can post videos, pls ignore Batty (easy I know) and continue to do so. Why? Because sometimes there may be bands with the same name and we need to know who you're talking about. Also because I'm an arsehole.
:)

That was my concern at the outset. The vast majority of the music I collect is not available anywhere, online or for purchase in physical form. These are mostly unreleased recordings that no one could claim or listen to at any price.

The same would go for my KLF library - 865 audio tracks independently compiled from test cassette tapes recorded at Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's studio over the years, found discarded and archived by various contacts I have who were close to the band.

The very same would go for the 95 music films I have ranging from music videos to full-length feature films by the band almost none of which were ever published or duplicated. Other than one or two direct sources who've independently archived these works, no one can see or hear these or buy them anywhere in the world.

I guess I can't really participate in this little venture. :( Sorry guys.

Goddamn it. You are too exclusive, sir! I guess I'll have to remove your name from the OP. But how can an artist be one of the best progressive house acts for 36 years, or whatever you said, and not have their music available???

Just sayin'... if I'd recorded 463 albums, with slight variations in tracklistings and runtimes depending on the country of distribution, and spent decades remixing and performing live, with literally thousands of hours of song fragments and innumerable permutations of alternate mixes for every song... I would have to be incredibly narcissistic to maintain and catalog my entire history for myself. And such a project would leave Rick and Karl with no time to write new material or to tour. They'd have to hire an archivist to maintain their library.

As for making it publically available, there is the impracticality of the matter to consider. The task of building a web-based server to host these thousands upon thousands of unnamed, unreleased tracks for the public to peruse would be a costly endeavor, to say nothing of the time it would take to structure them in any navigable fashion, let alone to maintain it to include new works in progress. And frankly, other than freaks like myself, there isn't really a tremendous demand for that sort of content.

Thankfully, there are freaks like me out there, taking it upon themselves to archive and maintain these libraries in honor of the artist. I'd planned to make my own cloud-based media server public for years, but copyright law makes it impossible. That's partially why the university shot down my pitch for my foundation. It just can't exist in any legal fashion. And likely most artists have their hands tied by their labels and couldn't share their non-commercial works even in they wanted to.

It's a damn shame.

Well, unbelievably and against all logic, reason and sanity in the universe, I, of all people, end up being the first on the leaderboard. OP now updated. To borrow a phrase from Batty: suck it, bitches! :finger:

Now for my next attempt: Freiheit - German pop band famous for their one-hit wonder "Keeping the dream alive"


Updates: 3 hours from gaining a place on the board: The Identity Matrix and Neapolitan, 4 hours The Batlord

So yeah, ISB wins, and we're all just going for second place.