Sometime last year, as I was traveling across America by foot, I stumbled into a strange basement somewhere in Savannah. Inside, there wasn’t much to write home about – cobwebs, a broken jukebox, some empty whiskey casks, a wedding dress covered in dust – but I felt like I couldn’t leave just quite yet.

From my periphery, I spotted a crumpled white box in the corner that seemed to be calling my name. I opened it and inside I found a handful of cassette tapes in rough shape. There must’ve been about 8 or so of them, barely hanging on for dear life, ruined from some pretty nasty water damage. I gave each one a closer inspection. The tapes had all been given melodramatic titles, written in what looked like youthful handwriting, all pink and purple ink, dotted with broken hearts and teardrops: “You’ll Be Okay In Time (But It Won’t Be Today),” “I Will Never Forget You,” “We Were Always Meant to Say Goodbye,” “When Does My Heart Beat Again?” There was a sense of devastation in these handmade artifacts. I couldn’t just leave them there to weather with time, so I stuffed ‘em in my bag and took ‘em home with me.

I desperately wanted to hear what was on them. They were banged up alright, but somehow still playable, so I put them in my cassette player and digitized what I could. Over and over again, tape after tape, were songs of heartache, echoes of longing. The sounds were rough, choppy, grainy, stretched, slowed, muddy – but they were still there. Ghostly, disappearing, sure, but still there.

I found myself rich with a mountain of curious raw materials. I wanted to do something with them, so I took these sounds and reconstructed tiny songs from the salvageable fragments, looping and rearranging the pieces to create new ones, adding samples from movies to string it all together and help tell the stories of heartbreak I found in these tapes. The final result is a 60 minute mix entitled It Doesn’t Stop. I don’t know who’s memories I found that day, but I did my best to preserve them here. Hopefully they’ll hold for a little while longer, before time gets a hold of them all…