The year started with a fury of work. Bass in Your Face Studio has been relocated to North Carolina and its slowly getting rewired and coming back to life. One of the first tasks is to start archiving various DAT and DTRS (Tascam multitrack) tapes to disk via the new Apogee Symphony setup. The archiving is needed because the tape machines are starting to die, and the tapes themselves are starting to delaminate and become unreadable. This is truly a Vin Cerf style race against time to change these formats into a more modern one or risk losing tons of original material.
Two initial finds in the DAT tape catalog were original tapes from the Muse party thrown at Bass in Your Face Studio in 1997. While the second part of the ambient set played by E was eventually released as “Remused”, the first part was never released. Both are now in a playlist on the ITFAIS SoundCloud site.
A lost DJ Stax practice tape was also found at the end of a DAT master that had other material. This practice tape had be recorded over with other material, but there is a 40 minute set from 1996 that was readable until the end of the tape. This has also been uploaded to the ITFAIS SoundCloud site.
Both of these can be found indexed on the ITFAIS New Releases page.
I plan to start archiving DTRS (multitrack) tapes as soon as I’m done with all the DAT tapes and as soon as Tascam repairs the multitrack machines that just eat tapes.