04.09.17
Recently, Plug Research handed us a bag of DATs they’d had in storage for years if not decades, and asked if we wanted to do anything with it. No one knew what, if anything, should be done but since then we’ve combed through and decidedly collected the very best from 60 of the tapes in a new FTV series, Lost And Found: Plug Research DATs.
A sister organization to dublab in the station’s early days, the label’s impactful roster included DJs and often-featured artists on dublab like Daedelus, Dntel, Flying Lotus, John Tejada, Nobody, Thomas Fehlmann, Mia Doi Todd, and others. What the best of the DATs show is that artists like these merely scratched the surface of a rich underground electronic music culture that’s been teeming in LA and internationally from the ’90s on, producing thousands of hours of unheard sounds.
While some tapes turned out to be backups of official releases or the masters themselves (Smyglyssna, Lustmord, Low Res, Jeremy Dower, Phthalocyanine, Farben, Gomez) or contained recognizable audio (William Burroughs reading Naked Lunch) others turned out to be complete mysteries and in fact lost gems — probably jams or demos sent to the label, or unique live recordings and demos by artists on the early roster.
Kicking things off is “MAXELL Ultimate Accuracy Sound Ceramic Armor Metal Particle DM 60 DAT Back Coated” — a mixtape, performance, jam, demo or combination thereof, that starts out as a minimal beat and quickly unfolds into a series of scenes, sounds and squelches…
FROM THE VAULTS is an ongoing curation project produced by Ben Sinclair, resurfacing rare live performances and DJ sets recorded during dublab’s first ten years.
