Tape Findings is a brand new mp3 blog devoted to home recordings and other odd audio cassettes found at thrift stores and garage sales. It kicked off last week with a couple of excerpts from a music class recording, a no-punches-pulled past life psychic reading (forget the usual ego-stroking guff about being an Atlantean high priestess in a past life, the poor subject in this one is told that she was hung as a witch in the early 1800’s!), and a bizarre vision of “grunge music” from 80’s kid cartoon, Teddy Ruxpin…
This is quite possibly the second best "teens for Satan" home recording ever made. (The best one is Satan's Blood by The Frugal Gourmets.) Imagine a couple of Swedish schoolgirls raised on red cordial and black metal being let loose on a cheap karaoke machine that plays nothing but cheesy gabber/techno (and the occasional Spice Girls track.) To give you a taste of the resulting insanity, here's a medley of two tracks by the gals. The first one is a kind of techno Beauty-and-the-Beast-gone-wrong with guttural barking and vampish "Ooh, Baby"s instead of comprehensible lyrics. (When Family First unleashes its inevitable scare campaign against non-Hillsong-approved clubbing with TV ads showing 14 year olds ODing on GBH, waking up in drug dealers' beds and shivering in laneways with running mascara... hopefully they'll use this as background music.) For the second track, ATR pinch their nostrils shut and do their best Nina-Hagen-with-rabies hatchet job on "If You Wanna Be My Lover"... If only school rock eisteddfods had been like this!
(A full CD can be purchased from Aquarius Records.)
I don’t know if any of you actually use MusicMatch Jukebox, a music utility that lets users record mp3s through the mic input on their PC… But if you do: be careful where you save your recordings. If you have a P2P file-sharing program and store your home recordings in the same folder as the one you share with the world, then anyone out there can download them. (If that's what you want though, you're in luck...)
One person who is doing this rather assiduously is Dr David Dixon, who maintains a site called Mic In Track (the name is a reference to the default filename given to MusicMatch files). Each week he posts a selection of choice mp3s plundered from the shared directories of the unsuspecting… The entries range from the scatological outbursts and improvised theatre pieces of children to earnest Christian rock recordings, freestyle raps and death metal vocal practice sessions…
Some of the posted pieces have also been used by Dr Dixon as the basis for a collection of techno tracks that have been released as a free-download EP by Comfort Stand. (Recommended highlight: Bunnyrabbits, Satan, Cheese and Milk.)