It began at a time where I had a lot of time on my hands. I was living at home, having left college, saving up money to go abroad. I had time. I had time to do things like sit in front of a computer monitoring sound output and waiting around for audio to transfer minute-by-minute, real time. Life changes.

There’s no way I have that sort of time now, for simple reasons. I still have all the audio I want to share, and all the equipment. However, age hasn’t done my Minidisc recorder any favors. The battery can’t hold a charge like it used to, and the right channel on the binaural microphones themselves seems to have gone sour. Most modern electronics weren’t built to last I suppose. It’s never long before they’re replaced by something better.

So really, the Manifesto of this blog that included an optimistic “Theory on How This Will Work” was really too optimistic. I’d like to think that someday I may make available an archive of some sort, but I don’t see this format going much of anywhere… even though it’d be really interesting.

So, for simply another event that was before it’s time, and whose time seems to have passed, let this be a monument. This is what might have been.

I did a tally of fifteen remaining discs. The total came to no less than 34 hours of recorded material, containing 150 discrete tracks between November of 2002 up until last August. This certainly seems like a dreadful amount. But I’ve done the math and it’s the equivalent of recording only 1 minute 58 seconds a day—which doesn’t sound like that much. However, this doesn’t even consider the time it takes to prepare, encode, and classify all that information. Which is a lot.

And I haven’t even finalized the layout.
Please commence supplication to a higher power.

The Irony: this sort of thing is now de rigeur. It’s called podcasting, and everyone who ever hankered for their own radio show has one. 20,000 of them in some directories. Unfortunately for me I was about two years ahead of the curve. My dreams of internet radio particapa-dom died as soon as I realized I was too cheap to buy my own website. Life’s funny that way. Now I have the place — but I need the time.

The Theory on How This Will Work: every week I unload a batch or so of recordings from ancient times. They’ll reside on my computer since I have only a gigabyte to work with server-side, and let me tell you there’s way more than a gig. BlogTorrent makes them available for download as either .torrent files or easy little executables. You download them. I’ll do my best to describe events I’ve mostly forgotten, and I ask you to fill me in whenever you can.

The Test: here goes something…

The sound’s not too great. I’m told it was a moist day, though.

Yes windchimes. In the second track, “Wandering Ear,” I appear to have walked around for two hours recording everything in sight (so to speak). Thankfully this happens to include the one and only performance of the famed “Squidy and Pete” duo. You can also hear Angela’s triumphant and decisive win for her performance of Devo’s “Whip It” (although I can’t seem to find the performance itself—let me know if you find it). Also featured: a goat who didn’t know she was a princess. Or a princess who didn’t know she was a goat.

Give it a listen.

I had to work hard to get this one—my MiniDisc recorder crashed and didn’t write the TOC, making the audio completely inaccessable. I had to improvise by using my old (broken) Sharp MT-15 to rewrite the whole evening as a single track.

Never listened to the whole recording except for when I was there, December 2002, almost three years ago. Look out for surprises.