The Lost Music Archives Since about 1983, I've been obsessed with music. It began casually enough, but strange things had happened with music beginning in the late '70s, and by the mid-80s, the broad general category of "rock music" was so far-flung that we started trying to categorize it with increasingly useless terms, since everything was cross pollinating anyway. In 1985, I began my descent into the underground. Somehow, I was tipped off to a radio program called "Out on the Fringe," broadcasting from midnight to 6am every Saturday and Sunday morning on the local (Lafayette, Louisiana) college radio station. I would stay up as late as possible, taping (on a tiny, crude '80s 'boom box') and jotting down band names of groups one simply could not hear on the Top 40 stations. Adherents of "the fringe" would congregate at tiny clubs, houses, and even barns to hear unknown bands perform; we dressed like punks and new wavers and deathrockers and nerds, but we all knew we were one tribe because no one else could possibly know about these places or bands. It was a primordial soup of subculture and new music; we called it "alternative," "progressive," "new wave," and "punk." A few groups I first heard on KRCL: Agent Orange, Laurie Anderson, the Butthole Surfers, Bauhaus, the Buzzcocks, the Bolshoi, Billy Bragg, Kate Bush, the Birthday Party, The Cure, the Call, Camper Van Beethoven, the Church, Cocteau Twins, Coil, the Cramps, Crass, the Communards, the Damned, Dead Can Dance, Dalis Car, the Dead Milkmen, the Dead Kennedys, Depeche Mode, Brian Eno, Erasure, Front 242, Faith No More, Frontline Assembly, Steve Fisk, Fuzzbox, the Feelies, Game Theory, Gene Loves Jezebel, Guadacanal Diary, Joy Division, Japan, the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, Killing Joke, the Lucy Show, Lydia Lunch, Lene Lovich, Laibach, the Lemonheads, Lords of the New Church, the Might Lemon Drops, New Model Army, Nitzer Ebb, Oingo Boingo, the Pixies, Propaganda, the Pogues, R.E.M., the Red Hot Chile Peppers, the Rezillos, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sisters of Mercy, SPK, Single Gun Theory, Shriekback, Skinny Puppy, the Smiths, Soft Cell, the Stranglers, Tones on Tail, This Mortal Coil, the Toy Dolls, Tear Garden, Test Dept., the The, Ultravox, Until December, U2, the Virgin Prunes, Visage, Wall of Voodoo, Wire, the Waterboys, (Clan of) Xymox, XTC, Yaz, and Yello. It was not unusual to hear any subset of these bands (and hundreds of others) played back to back - there were no lines to distinguish "goth" bands from "punk" ones, "industrial" music from "new wave," or any other subset - it was all thrown in together, and what an amazing education it was! Some of these bands went on the fame and fortune while others disappeared into the mists of time. One problem with "The Fringe," as a radio show, was a problem that haunts nearly every non-profit "alternative" radio show I've ever heard: the DJs were non professionals, indeed were often wholly untrained, and they had terrible habits. They would often play 30 minutes' to an hour's worth of music before finally "back announcing" the entire playlist. Often they got it wrong or failed to announce a band or song title, which made it extremely difficult to figure out who did which song. (When I got a job working at another college radio station in 1986, I made it top priority that I always announce songs every 3-4 songs, and that I announced almost every song, so that others wouldn't be in the same boat.) Tapes I made back then are full of "unknown songs," - songs I have no idea who performed or where to find. It drives me crazy. I listened to thousands of records in my radio years, finding the titles of songs in often strange places (since some of these early bands were often all over the map in terms of style - have you ever heard an early Butthole Surfer's album, for instance?). Whenever I met someone with extensive musical knowledge, I'd start describing songs to them, which turned up a few answers or suggestions (I listened to enough Japan to make me vomit in an attempt to find a song that turned out to be by Ultravox! That song took me about 8 years to find.) Sometimes the DJs' south Louisiana accents made it impossible to recognize a title; I spent years looking for a band called "Charter Vision," only to discover that the DJ actually had slurred "Joy Division," a discovery I made completely by accident. All of this leads me to the point of this page: the Unknown Songs Archive. The plan here is to place descriptions and (eventually) sound clips from songs I can't identify, in hopes that someone will be able to tip me off as to the title or band for each. This will no doubt be another losing battle, but at least I can say I tried! A lot of these are particularly hard to identify because they don't fit into the usual easy-to-categorize music genres; many are examples of mid-80s industrial / noise / experimental music, which has few followers. The songs can't be easily described, and don't have the distinguishing marks that make, for instance, a Duran Duran song easy to recognize as Duran Duran even if you have never heard the song before. If you have a song you can't identify, feel free to describe it as well as you can, and I'll post it here. Maybe someone will wander by and be able to recognize it. Email me at with as much info as you can. Send a soundclip if by some miracle you happen to have one, too.

All the Music We Have Lost
Id	Identified!	Music description	Vocal description	Distinguishing lyrics	Other noteworthy details	Sound clip
1	Identified! Butthole Surfers: Boiled Dove	Minimalist music, consisting primarily of jangling guitar, poorly recorded and remaining in the background. Some tape loops or found sound in the background.	Male vocalist, primarily talking although some (poor) singing on the "I can't tell you," part. Toward the end there are several other male voices also talking, layered over each other.	Opening lyrics: Imagine your father was naked and you had just fallen through the ceiling into a room full of soft moist eyeballs. I can't tell you but my mind keeps fading away, and you tried talking but you don't got nothing to say, so we tried stealing but somebody took it away... No! You're in the family car and you're following a Checker Cab which can somehow fly...	Recorded before 1988. This song seems to be a description of 2 or more dreams.	None yet
2	Identified! The Velvet Underground: Murder Mystery Lyric (thanks to Milo!)	Minimalist music, consisting primarily of quiet guitar remaining in the background. Some music that sounds like found music toward end.	Multiple vocalists: 2 males, 1 female. The 2 males speak through most of the song, the female sings during "chorus" parts such as they are.	The lyrics seem to be recited poetry, found words, lists of words and names, thesaurus entries and / or entries from a rhyming dictionary. "Caroline, Caroline, Caroline oh..." is one of the distinguishing lines. I'll try to write down more, but they're really hard to recognize especially since there are 2 vocalists at a time.	Recorded before 1987. The song is recorded differently in the right and left channels.	None yet
More to come...

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