________ ________ ________
2018-12-05 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
Let me take you back a little ways. / _/ / /
\_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
About a thousand years ago there was a / \/ \/ / \
website called mp3.com and it was a / _/ /_ _/
beautiful thing, independent artists could /- / _/ /
upload and share their music, labels could \________/\________/\___/____/
upload and share music on behalf of their
artists, it had really excellent discoverability through searching or browsing
tags and they also offered a kind of on-demand CDr service so artists could
sell albums without having to worry about all the trouble of manufacturing it
themselves.
It was genuinely glorious and for a good while the only place I would go
for music, there are so many bands I still listen to today that I first
discovered through mp3.com; the Dryads/Some of the Quiet, Lowsunday, Lycia,
The Moors, Tri-State Killing Spree, Not Applicable, Vodka Lime... and those
are just off the top of my head, without even peeking into my collection.
Unfortunately, like everything on the internet inevitably will, it ended in
a mess of legal action and corporate buy-outs, a couple ugly re-workings and
then sudden shut-down. To this date, to me it is one of the most heartbreaking
losses I've ever seen on the internet. Some pieces survive on the Internet
Archive and Archive Team/Textfiles figurehead Jason Scott has said on a few
occasions that a near-complete archive does exist but is extremely complicated
to make available online, both in legal terms and in terms of its sheer size.
A few bands I discovered back then are still around and a few of the
artists have moved on to other projects I've heard about, but so much - and I
really can't stress just HOW much - was lost when mp3.com imploded. There was
a brief period when a part of the mp3.com collection resurfaced on a site
called GarageBand but that quickly closed its doors too, handballing artists
to another site and on and on.
One band I remember fondly from back then and still listen to was called
Moya, it was the dreamy indie rock side-project of Seattle visual artist Aaron
Jasinski. I've been carefully dragging a handful of Moya mp3s with me through
life for probably close to 20 years. Sometimes I'd search around to see if
they'd resurfaced anywhere and I had known for a while that Aaron Jasinski had
continued releasing music under the name "Jasinski" but it just wasn't the
same.
Earlier in the week, on a whim I thought I'd reach out to him, just to say
hi and let him know that I was a fan from those days and to see if maybe he
had the Moya stuff still kicking around and to my delight I actually got a
response! Not just a "thank you" response either, a really amazing one.
Jasinski has collected what Moya tracks he still had into a compilation and
put them up, name your price, on Bandcamp.
It's just amazing, I'm over the moon. I was able to update the old mp3.com
mp3s I still had to higher quality ones, replace the ones I lost to bit rot
and corruption and even hear some new songs I hadn't heard back in the day!
Please, have a listen:
https://jasinski.bandcamp.com/album/the-moya-tracks-1997-2000
EOF
