Post by pzi on Jul 21, 2018 5:58:39 GMT
The above video is an audio recording from December 1994 of a concert played in Perth, WA, Australia. There were a number of acts that performed at this concert. Most notably to me, and most relevant to this discussion, is a little known slowcore band called Bluetile Lounge.
Bluetile Lounge were a four piece slowcore act, active from 1991 to 1998. The group disbanded just after the release of their second album, Half-Cut, released on Smells Like Records. Their music holds a huge amount of sentimental value to me, and they have over time gained a small cult following online through communities such as last.fm, rateyourmusic, or 4chan's music board. Very little documentation of the band's existence besides their two records and several appearences on v/a compilations was available until fairly recently. There are two videos of the band playing live, and only two publicly available still photos of the band, both of which are from the same photo shoot. There is a podcast about the band that the band's singer and guitarist, Dan Erickson, showed up on, which cleared up a lot of the information regarding the band's history. There is also an article written about the band's first album, Lowercase.
So, back to the concert. The show's lineup contained quite a few bands from Perth's small scene at the time. This is known because a CD compiling songs from the sets that these bands played was released the following year. The CD is called The Butterfly CD, and it was released by a sexual assault awareness organization, known as Stand Against Sexual Assault. I can find absolutely no information about this organization anywhere. In hopes of there being some information about this organization, who ran it, or how to contact them (despite the CD being over two decades old, it could still have some information to point me in the right direction, right?) , I called the State Library of Western Australia (who seem to have the only confirmed copy in ownership) and asked about what information the insert of CD contained. The library's website now has the information available, but the insert says where the concert was recorded (the Grosvenor Hotel in Perth), how long the show lasted (from Noon to Midnight), and when it was recorded (December 3rd, 1994).
After a quick google search, the Grosvenor Hotel was easy to track down. I filled out a contact form on their site, and they responded fairly quickly, saying that nobody who works there had been there long enough to have been around for the show or have known anything about it. This is where I don't know what to do. I would really, really love to hear some new material from this band, as their music is truly special to me. In the only other recording of a full set from the band, they play a relatively short set, clocking in at 24 minutes, though this is partly because it was a much busier festival with far bigger acts (Sonic Youth and Pavement, among others) about to play. But, at a 12 hour show consisting only of local acts (there are 13 of them showing up in the CD's tracklisting) the average set is like, 55 minutes not accounting for any downtime so I think that it's very possible that there is more to this recording although only the brooding, shoegazey Passenger ended up on the album.
In any case, I think that the best course of action is probably trying to get in touch with someone who was a part of that scene... Whether it be someone who was in one of these bands, or someone who just attended the concerts, they may have some useful information. I would try to contact the band directly, although a friend of mine tried to do this a few months back and was told by the guy who made the aforementioned podcast that he wasn't allowed to give out Dan Erickson's e-mail, so I don't think that's something to go for.
