In late September an unsolicited package arrived at the Atlanta home of writer, graphic designer, and indie-scene gadfly Henry Owings, whose endeavors range from the long-running zine Chunklet to Grammy-winning design work for Revenant Records’ 2001 Charley Patton box set. The package was from Chris Thomson, most recently singer for Chicago’s Red Eyed Legends but best known for fronting a series of D.C. posthardcore bands, among them Circus Lupus, the Monorchid, and Skull Kontrol. It contained more than two dozen cassettes and a handwritten note: “Seeing as your becoming the institutional memory for punk rock I thought you might make a fine home for these aniquated cassettes.”
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“It’s so weird,” Owings says, “because on one level it’s like, ‘Oh my God, this is really amazing stuff,’ but I think in the grander scheme of things I know like ten people in the country probably care. . . . Ten people are really excited about this and millions aren’t.” But this haul is to those people (who probably number more in the thousands) what the Dead Sea Scrolls were to biblical scholars. And rather than trying to determine whether any of the tapes might yield something commercially releasable, Owings simply started digitizing them and posting them at chunklet.com as free downloads. Since September 22 he’s shared a live set from Minor Threat and demos from Circus Lupus, the Monorchid, and Cupid Car Club.
“I don’t know how he does it,” Thomson says. “He’s probably been this way for 20 years. I don’t know how you can be so excited for this stuff.”
The Thomson collection, though, is more exciting for Owings, not just because some of the music has never been released but because he’s at his liberty to spread it far and wide on the Web—an approach better suited to his missionary zeal. But with great power comes great responsibility. “In one sense I am flattered and honored that he asked for me to be sort of the, what shall I call it? The caretaker,” Owings says. “But on the other hand I am starting to think, because I’ve been transferring all this stuff, I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit!’ Because it’s coming time where a lot of this stuff is going to turn to shit, it’s going to turn to just powder.” A tape’s magnetic-oxide coating crumbles and falls off over time, taking the music with it.
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