For the last twenty years I've been sitting on two old suitcases full of original live cassette recordings from my tenure as a sound man from the mid 80's to the 90's.
The tapes are mainly from two music clubs where I ran sound and lights,
Nightstage in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and
Cruise Cafe in Oslo, Norway. I used to make these recordings for reference, I'd usually listen to them the next morning to relive psycho acoustic phenomena's from the night before, besides that, I'm a music buff.
I have never copied nor distributed the tapes before and will only make them available for streaming via this page and stored on my weeklyleaks.net web hotel. They are not for sale and I will not make copies nor make them downloadable. At times bands and road managers linked up to my recorder and made their own copies but most of these are believed to be unique recordings.
Technically speaking these tape are not of broadcast quality as the musical mixes are balanced for the PA and do not take into account stage volume levels, house eq or system balance.. Also none of them are complete performances, recording was not a priority, getting the house sound right and the performers comfortable was. Some tapes start up in the middle of a song , run out in the middle of the song etc. Bear with me.
Most tapes are right off the board but some are recorded with a mono mix to one channel and a microphone (most likely a
Shure SM57) picking up the room in the other.
I will publish links to official recordings where you can purchase the music of the recorded artists, please help me out here so I can link to releases where the performer actually sees some money. Hopefully these live recordings will inspire you to do so.
I had a great time working with these artist and I look forward to listening to them again. I'll try and write a few words, not reviews just ramblings about each concert and I hope to publish one every other week depending on my tour/work schedule. Hopefully this project won't be too overwhelming as its all of my doing and a labor of love.
Look forward to concerts with,
Mose Allison,
Mick Taylor,
Tracy Chapman,
Townes Van Zandt, Dizzy Gillespie,
Tom Russell, Eek A Mouse,
Dr. John,
Giant Sand,
Loudon Wainwright,
Astor Piazzolla,
Screaming Jay Hawkins,
Carl Perkins,
Bill Monroe,
Etta James,
Rick Danko,
Levon Helm,
American Music Club,
Albert King,
Michelle Shocked,
Duke Robillard,
Delbert McClinton and a bunch more, it should keep me busy...
Please contact me if you as an artist or their legal estate do not want these recordings made public.
A high bit rate wave file copy will be made available to the artists upon request. The audio available for preview on this site is only at 96kbps.
Thanks
Martin Hagfors
The concerts will be transfered from my old
Sony TC-D5, the same deck that I recorded them with.