Chicago-based music superfan Adam Jacobs has been recording the concerts he attends since the 1980s and has an archive. over 10,000 tapes. Jacobs, now 59, knows these cassettes are going to deteriorate over time, so he agreed to give them to volunteers at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. digitize the tapes.
To date, approximately 2,500 of these tapes have been posted to the Internet Archive, including some rare gems such as Nirvana performance from 1989. (The group didn’t reach a mainstream audience until they released the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991.) Within the collection, you can also find previously unknown recordings from influential artists like Sonic Youth, REM, Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole bunch of other punk groups.
For many of these recordings, Jacobs was using very average equipment, but volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive have made these tapes sound fantastic.
Brian Emerick, a volunteer, drives up to jacobs house In order to pick up more boxes of tapes – once a month – he has to use an anachronistic cassette deck to play the tapes, which are converted to digital files. From there, other volunteers clean, organize, and label the recordings, even tracking down the song names of forgotten punk bands.
Sometimes, the internet is good. and so is this tracy chapman recording Since 1988.
