I have all sorts rolling around on my drive for that very reason. The work of Karin Dreijer's first band in her pre-The Knife days? I have that. I saved one of my favourite game soundtracks of all time in the early 2000s, and I was actually vindicated in that case, the company went bust and the soundtrack wasn't available until the composer put it up on bandcamp. I still have both copies regardless too, because in my mind they're both different though the bandcamp one does have some extra tracks on it. Similarly, I ripped the Soundcloud version of Brian Reitzell & Daniel Lopatin's The Bling Ring Suite because it was at a different tempo AND structured differently to the release version, and that version is no longer on Daniel's soundcloud.
This might seem like a futile effort, but it's super important to me, I believe archival of media is crucial for not only records sake, but to hopefully inspire future creatives too. A few of us are doing our part though, here's a Oneohtrix Point Never mix I posted back in 2010/11, and it exists nowhere else on the 'net than my old soundcloud. I thought about adding it to discogs, but there's really not too much info I could say. It's a CD-R with a little bit of text on that says "Objects In Mirrors Mix" that was a bonus pack-in when I ordered Rifts from Bleep.com back then. I've tried to fill out the tracklist as best I can, but even so it's still thin on the ground (808 State's Flow Coma and Ann Steel's My Time being most prominent.) It used to have downloads enabled but the limit's been hit in the years gone, so if anyone wants to add this to their own archives, you can do so here.
Longtime readers might recognise the name Untra. I certainly do, even before I was on the writing staff let alone running the place they've been around, and who's avatar has always been quite fittingly the word "Revive". And this next tale is actually the reason for this post, as after a quick exchange on twitter, we got our virtual crate digging boots on with a goal: resurrect a long forgotten mix from a dead website (lasermag.net for those curious). Thanks to the Internet Archive & The Wayback Machine, I was able to pinpoint the year and month of the mix being posted, but unfortunately not the page itself. In what was a total crapshoot I tweeted at the author of the mix, who longtime readers might also recognise, GMGN. To my surprise and delight, he came through and happily DM'd me a link to the mix, and (with permission) Untra has archived it among many other mixes from years past (including some from ilictronix!) on mixcloud, where it will hopefully be preserved for many moons to come. And thanks to mixcloud's tracklist system, you shouldn't have nearly as hard a time tracking down individual tunes from it. So with all that out of the way, please enjoy.
It feels like we've come full circle here, after all emailing an artist to get a copy of a long forgotten tune is precisely what led to me getting on the writing staff in the first place. You can still read Jordan's initial posting, and the full tale of how I came into possession of the track in the comments from a pre-blogger account Claude Van Foxbat.. We'll continue our mission to keep records of all things electronic for now and ever, if you have any leads on, or copies of any obscure mixes, drop me or Untra a line, our twitters are: @ClaudeVanFoxbat and @Untra. Super special thanks to GMGN for coming through with the mix, having it stored for all this time, giving us a copy and allowing us to archive it on Untra's Mixcloud!.
-Claude Van Foxbat
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