Someone Has Just Made 30GB of 80s Underground Cassettes Available for Download (HINT: Think CKLN-FM)

If you lived in Toronto in the 80s, there were a couple of places you could go for non-mainstream music. First, there was CFNY-FM which was still in its Spirit of Radio days. The other was CKLN-FM, the low-power radio station headquartered at Ryerson, which still hadn’t been accredited university status.

Blasting at 500 watts at 88.1 FM, CKLN filled a gap in community radio with music and talk that couldn’t be found anywhere else. For Torontonians, it was the alternative to the alternative.

Archive.org has just announced a massive collection of cassettes donated by Mike Dyer, a former CKLN host that date from sometime in the mid-80s to the mid-90s. The 30GB of material needs a lot of work with annotations and cataloguing, but it sounds like a worthy and important project. The trove of material features everything from “tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials.”

If you are a wannabe archivist and want to help out–or if you’re just curious about the kind of music Mike collected as a CKLNer–head over to Archive.org and download all 30GB here.

Hey, what else are you gonna do over the holidays? (Via Tom and Factmag)