Long ago in the Beforetimes, there was a site called mp3.com. It was a wild, untamed land where anyone could post songs and throw up links to like-minded artists and friends. Here was a platform that truly leveled the playing field: you could listen to some brutal power electronics on one page and then pop over to check out some acoustic songs by your cousin's girlfriend on another, all in the same place. This was absolutely mind-blowing for the time. It was also perfect breeding ground for compilations and collaborative projects among artists of all sorts, but it was especially exciting for people doing experimental electronics.

I maintained an mp3.com page for anaphylaxis for quite some time, and in the early days it was often a frustrating process. This was before the widespread adoption of broadband, so uploading tracks could take ages. Inspired and/or annoyed by this limitation, I decided to do several short pieces that could be uploaded in a more reasonable amount of time. And considering that any number of artists working in the same sphere were also on the site and trading tracks, albums, and ideas all over the place, I somehow decided it would be a good idea to do a collaborative album of 71 one-minute tracks built from pieces of sound sent to me from all over the world.

Naturally, it was doomed almost from the start.

Several artists sent me sound files to work with, which I was able to implement right away. These tracks are included in this final version of the album. Many other people sent me tapes, which at the time were much tougher to work with. I didn't have a way to easily transfer the sound from tape to digital--other than some frankensteined thing I managed to cobble together to plug a microcassette recorder into a PC to capture audio--and so contributions rapidly piled up. Like seemingly every noise/experimental/whatever artist at the time, I was in the midst of a ludicrous number of projects with split releases, compilations, remixes, etc. etc. etc. Once I fell behind, I found it difficult to keep going.

In the middle of all this, my life underwent a massive and traumatic upheaval. I left my job and moved my whole life somewhere else. In the hasty move, many things ended up in boxes where they still may yet lie. I was unemployed for a while, eventually picked up a pair of part-time retail jobs, and fought a deep depression to try and finish up some split releases and other stuff I'd been working on. But the scale of this particular project cast a looming shadow over all of that. Every time I thought of returning to it, I despaired that I would never be able to finish it. Eventually anaphylaxis and any other recording projects sort of faded into the background while I tried to piece my life back together. But I could never bring myself to return to this project that I started during one era of my life and sputtered to a dead stop at the start of another.

But here now at the end of all things, I am hopefully putting this long-suffering phantom to rest. I found the tracks and managed to dig up the minimal liner notes I had posted on a dedicated site for the project. (Unsurprisingly, the cover art seems to be long gone. Trust me when I say this is not a big loss.) I am grateful for my collaborators and their support and deeply regretful that I was never able to complete this project. I apologize for the lost tapes and lost time. I sincerely hope the ensuing two decades(!!?!?!?!?) have treated you well. I hope you are OK.

The info for each track lists myself and the artist(s) who collaborated on it. I have lost touch with almost all of them over the years. I am posting this album for free download only, and if any of you are out there and don't want your track available here just drop me a line and I'll remove it.

Take care, everyone. As always, thank you for your time and kind attention.

Jason Coffman
30 April 2020