This morning we got an email from Nicholas Taplin, who recently launched Post-Consumer a website currently hosting 546 live recordings of bands that played Santa Cruz basements, living rooms, etc. Intrigued, we headed over and spotted a bunch of goodies like Frog Eyes, vintage Microphones, pre-Oh, Inverted World Shins, and Six Organs Of Admittance. We were curious how it got started, so we contacted Taplin, who's in Portland, Oregon now, and asked him about his motivation for starting Post-Consumer:
I need to write a really descriptive biography of my time in Santa Cruz, because it completely defined who I am today. I went to UCSC for college after high school and discovered about half way through my freshman year that there was a really active indie music scene in Santa Cruz. The shows were almost entirely house shows so I wasn't prohibited from seeing them because of being underage.Towards the end of my freshman year I got a DAT recorder and started recording all the shows I went to.Recording shows became my reason for being at the shows because I was so socially underdeveloped that I couldn't really have a normal conversation (I'm bipolar). This turned out to be fortunate because as I got more comfortable socially I became too lazy to record shows. The goal with my recording was to document a scene that I thought was really engaging and lively.It actually shocked me that no one else had been recording the shows before me.On the site I have a pretty democratic selection of what I recorded (and I was pretty democratic about what I recorded). The 546 songs on the site are only half of my total collection of shows.
He went on to say he's not sure when he'll up more -- it's time-consuming and he's doing it all without earning anything. One thing he didn't mention in the email, but which we caught on the site, is that the songs were upped chronologically and not according to band, so it also provides an interesting time-line if you follow it 1-546. We're on 277 right now.
