Q: What is the difference between an "actual release" and a private tape release?
A: The money and connections for manufacturing and distribution of a product, usually one that is in a more "concrete" form than cassette tape. Sometimes there is a very noticeable difference in sound quality. Mostly, there is "official sanction" by an authority figure. Beyond that: nothing. Trust me on this one. I learned the difference when Paper Bag released Ticket to Trauma on SST, after we'd been hawking our indie cassette releases through magazines like Option and Flipside for a few years. The product, procedure and musicians were the same. What changed was the machinery behind it. We had some kind of official sanction, a more concrete format, and better access to the marketplace. (This is even more ironic when you consider that for a good few years, cassette was the best-selling format on the market. As long as it had a major label's name on it!) The "official sanction" part seems to matter most to a lot of people- "oh, someone liked it enough to invest some money in it, so it must be good." Oh, really? Two words for ya, folks- Vanilla Ice.*
It is for this reason that I have opted to present my original indie cassette releases as albums on this site. They were all conceived and recorded as serious releases, albeit in some cases on lo-fi equipment. Nonetheless, they were distributed- privately or not- and got college airplay. ("Water From the Moon" was played around the country, and one cut in particular, "The Taker", got playlisted at stations from Boston to Moscow, Idaho. "Night Circus" was played in its entirety, all 90 or so minutes, on KXLU in Los Angeles.)
I am now starting to make these available on CD, through the PAle series. These are home-brewed CDRs and while I have tried very hard to make them high quality, I imagine there might still be some resistance to their legitimacy. Looking to the past, we can see that William Blake didn't give a fuck and neither do I. Got Greg if ya want it.
All told, there are probably about 10 albums of "unreleased" solo material, including but not limited to what's described on this site. Some of it truly is unreleased, having never been sent out or broadcast in any form. As of now, that will change.
As for the bands listed here:
Paper Bag had 4 official releases, not counting the early indie cassette releases. The last one we did before "Ticket to Trauma", a wonderful little gem called "Victimless Crime", sold enough for us to have printed it up as an album and made our money back. Which we would have done- had we known or been in a position to do it. One day we hope to make this a reality. But as mentioned at the Paper Bag site, there is around 400 hours of tape. At least half of that is releasable, if not more. At this point I do not know if I will be handling any Paper Bag releases.
There is more of Cold Sky than I'd originally thought. My first guess, posted here for a good while, was that there was about 2 CDs worth. It now appears more likely that there is enough decent stuff to release at least 3 discs, possibly 4 or 5.
Then there's SOS, which was basically a provisional band between Cold Sky and Dog Neutral. There were just a few sessions, but very good ones. I estimate 3 or 4 discs.
Dog Neutral has a ton of stuff recorded- an album of 8-track studio work, and some really hideous amount of stereo 2-track DAT, recorded live with top-notch equipment over 3 years. Again, this was a band that improvised, about 75% of its set. I can't even hazard a guess as to how much stuff there is that's worth releasing. There's a lot. My guess is that for Dog Neutral, it's similar to live Cream, Hendrix, Floyd, Doors or Zeppelin, where you have a lot of the same basic songs but the variations go all over the map. Provided someone was interested enough, they could definitely make a hobby out of it. How much of this gets out depends largely on how well Hyam and I agree on this subject, which remains to be seen.
This is also true for Jugalbandi- there's probably another 3 to 5 discs worth of stuff recorded prior to the J2K set, but no clear consensus yet on how much of it to release. And of course, we hope there will be new recordings.
And now...the vault opens............
*Here's a very relevant quote from Paul Goodman: "The centralizing style (of social organization) makes for both petty conforming and admiration for bigness. The more routine and powerless people are, the more they are mesmerized by extrinsic proofs of production and power. An enterprise that is designed on a small scale for a particular need of a particular people comes to be regarded as though it were nothing at all. To win attention and support, it must call itself a Pilot Project, promising mighty applications." (back to top)