The Living Archive of Underground Music

It’s amazing what you can find that you never knew was right in your own backyard. In this case there’s so much of it, it’s hard to know where to start. I was steered towards The Living Archive of Underground Music page by Pete from San Francisco noise act fognozzle (a group we originally co-founded in the mid-90s). We’d been swapping random cassette culture links after I’d unearthed, photographed and digitized a bunch of our old tapes. The photo was inexplicably very popular and even made it into a feature in Wired. The Living Archive got stared at for a few minutes with little understanding by me and then the tab sat open for about a month. I looked at it again today and realized what a wonder existed there.

On this site I will attempt to give you a personal overview of underground, independent, and home recorded music. I will not try to give a complete chronological survey of what happened during the “golden years” of cassette culture (approx. 1980-1995) but will introduce you to various characters and sounds I have been exposed to during that period. I will enlist others to give their own experiences and I will have plenty of links to investigate.

This is the introduction to the site by it’s creator Don Campau. Don has been a radio DJ since 1971 and has been doing the No Pigeonholes show, focused on home produced music, since he started it in 1985. The show is still going, and can be heard online; on the air on KKUP 91.5FM – Non-Commercial People’s Radio in the Cupertino/South Bay/Santa Cruz Monterey area; and, on Germany’s Radio Marabu. Oh yeah… and he kept recordings of the shows, along with playlists and pictures of old cassette releases. That’s a big part of what the archive is about.

Imagine finding out that someone had been as obsessed with new and original music as John Peel, they’d been doing it for nearly as long, and there’s very little of it you ever could have heard before. Welcome to your big new online time dump and work-time listening destination.