For quite a few years I’ve been promising to unearth my mix archives. Basically, the mixes on this site have never really stretched back before 1999 (unless some of you recall the Summer in Seattle mix from ’97, which once lived here in hideously low quality Real Audio). For the most part this has never materialised because I’ve not transferred anything over from tape, but I’ve also missed a few things along the way, so they aren’t all ancient. For a while I thought I’d hold out for a good price on a PlusDeck2c on eBay but they seem to be going up in price if anything, so I decided to crack on and get this thing rolling.

The first herculean hurdle was to align tapes with cases. Far too many of the tapes had no identifiable markings, and quite a few cases with tracklists needed to be filled. This hurdle is now clear, save about ten cases that seem to have no contents, and about twenty radio archives from ’96-’97 that have no markings or tracklists – but this is miles better than where I started.

I’m now at the point where I’ve got a lot of tapes to encode, then I need to vet them before inflicting them on the public again. I imagine there will be quite a few worth resurrecting, many with painful late-teens/early-twenties geeky radio monologues. On the other hand, I read a mean Public Service Announcement.

Along the way I’ve also been reminded of some later mixes that were kicking around on minidisc and CD. These are fresher in my memory, so I’ll be shipping these out internetwards in the next few days if all goes to plan.

Assuming this plan doesn’t fizzle, this is a taste of what’s to come thereafter.