Oh man, that is so cool and terrifying at the same time. I made many a terrible audio cassette as a teenager, and I shudder to think that someone might find one and put it on the internet. It kind...
Oh man, that is so cool and terrifying at the same time. I made many a terrible audio cassette as a teenager, and I shudder to think that someone might find one and put it on the internet. It kind of reminds me of the Museum of Bad Art, though this seems less incendiary and more like a love letter to home recording.
The one titled Karaoke Night at the Fallout Shelter got my attention because when I was in high school, my band used to play at the local fallout shelter. (Man we were so 80s in the 80s.) To set the scene, I grew up in the suburbs of Flint, MI in the 80s when it was dubbed the murder capital of the US. There was a beautiful old theater that had fallen into disrepair called "The Capital Theater". Someone owned it, but it was too far gone to actually house anything normal people would go see, so they rented it out to teenagers who would hold hall shows and let us drink alcohol. The genres ranged from punk to straight-ahead rock to psychedelia. (These shows were very white. There wasn't a lot of racial intermixing at the time. Not sure how it is now.) My band was once described as "those art fags". We were a tad more artsy than most of the acts.
What I loved about these shows is that because nobody cared about the theater, when you were performing, you had access to everything. You ran the lights, the sound, etc. So we'd trade off. When a friend's band was on, I'd run lights. When we were on, they'd run lights, etc. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. But the music was often very bad. It was experimental, so it could be interesting, but it didn't often sound good. And that's why I shudder to think about someone uploading our performances to the internet.
Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
EDIT: To clarify, initially, we played in the city's fallout shelter in the basement beneath the stage. In later years, we actually played on the stage. Hence the connection with "Karaoke Night at the Fallout Shelter".
“I certainly have collected some unknown albums that I think are absolute shit. Not everything unknown is interesting. It’s not like every unknown cassette that I come across automatically goes into the Archive. At the end of the day, I’m interested in amplifying the voices of these tiny artists that wouldn’t get heard otherwise. I want them to survive into the amplified age.”
Oh man, that is so cool and terrifying at the same time. I made many a terrible audio cassette as a teenager, and I shudder to think that someone might find one and put it on the internet. It kind of reminds me of the Museum of Bad Art, though this seems less incendiary and more like a love letter to home recording.
The one titled Karaoke Night at the Fallout Shelter got my attention because when I was in high school, my band used to play at the local fallout shelter. (Man we were so 80s in the 80s.) To set the scene, I grew up in the suburbs of Flint, MI in the 80s when it was dubbed the murder capital of the US. There was a beautiful old theater that had fallen into disrepair called "The Capital Theater". Someone owned it, but it was too far gone to actually house anything normal people would go see, so they rented it out to teenagers who would hold hall shows and let us drink alcohol. The genres ranged from punk to straight-ahead rock to psychedelia. (These shows were very white. There wasn't a lot of racial intermixing at the time. Not sure how it is now.) My band was once described as "those art fags". We were a tad more artsy than most of the acts.
What I loved about these shows is that because nobody cared about the theater, when you were performing, you had access to everything. You ran the lights, the sound, etc. So we'd trade off. When a friend's band was on, I'd run lights. When we were on, they'd run lights, etc. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. But the music was often very bad. It was experimental, so it could be interesting, but it didn't often sound good. And that's why I shudder to think about someone uploading our performances to the internet.
Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
EDIT: To clarify, initially, we played in the city's fallout shelter in the basement beneath the stage. In later years, we actually played on the stage. Hence the connection with "Karaoke Night at the Fallout Shelter".