Post by bigwelds on Sept 3, 2024 22:03:32 GMT
Hi all,
First off apologies if this is in the wrong section, I am a long time lurker and a bit prone to mistakes like that.
Either way I've taken an interest recently in the web versions of Memphis Bells by The Prodigy; back in 2004 they ran an unusual promotion where the purchaser could choose between a set of 3 beats, 8 bell melodies, and 11 guitar melodies to put together a unique version of the track on alwaysoutnumbered.com. The webpage has been well archived (internet archive version here, also archived on a few The Prodigy specific archive sites I found whilst rummaging around for info) although information around the actual promotion is a little scarce (Wikipedia's info on it has zero citations?). What hasn't been particularly well archived are the tracks purchased from the website itself. Apparently 5,000 copies were sold via this site, meaning there are up to 5,000 lost versions of Memphis Bells.
A little context for what I am about to mention - each of these tracks is represented by three numbers corresponding to what components the purchaser chose. The first pertains to the beat, the second the bells, and the third the guitar. There are also three mixes that could be chosen from (headphones, big system, and normal/classic) but I have left these out of my write up because it made it even harder to parse.
In my rummaging around I have found a few versions; initially I found two transcoded FLAC files of 1-1-3 and 3-1-2 (archived here) in a large The Prodigy discography torrent, as well as 3-6-7 on YouTube, with the uploader offering the original .dts format file in the comments. I did some rummaging on SoulseekQT and found all of the above in mp3 format along with some others (archived here) - namely 1-1-1, 1-1-2, 1-1-7, 2-1-10, 2-6-5, 2-7-5, 3-1-5, 3-2-3, 3-3-2, 3-3-9, 3-6-3, and 3-8-1, in various mixes.
Furthermore this fansite page has a snippet of 1-8-7, and I have also found a .!ut file claiming to be 3-3-7 - .!ut files are uncompleted torrent downloads, suggesting that 3-3-7, at the very least, is out there in another torrent somewhere.
I know this is a search pretty much impossible to complete considering it consists of 5,000 20 year old files, but I've been intrigued by this since stumbling across it on Wikipedia as a pretty casual fan of The Prodigy. If anyone has any ideas of anywhere I could poke around for these it would be very appreciated!
