Ghost Like Sun – The IUMA Demos (CD)
Update: The second Ghost Like Sun album, Human Satellite, is now available right here, on this blog.
A long time ago, at the very dawn of the web, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was born. It was designed to allow unsigned artists to post their music for listening, downloading, and comments. Rather like soundcloud.com is today. As time went on, IUMA was purchased by a succession of companies, eventually vanishing in 2006.
I happened to click on a random artist while browsing that early web on a VAXstation 3100 using NCSA Mosaic and happened to like what I heard. That band was Ghost Like Sun (Internet Archive copy). I ended up having an extended correspondence with the guitarist, Leigh Newsome, and bought their first (and only) album, Loud as Light. There was going to be a second album, but as far as I know, it was never released. Eventually the Ghost Like Sun web site followed IUMA into the digital dustbin. The domain is now parked in Japan.
When listiening to Loud as Light in the car this past weekend, I said to myself “I wonder what ever happened to the IUMA demos I downloaded all those years ago”. Well, this is what happened to them:
Z:\Terri\Music>dir *.mp2
Volume in drive Z is data
Volume Serial Number is 10B3-C748
Directory of Z:\Terri\Music
10/30/1997 06:13 AM 7,105,100 victoria.mp2
05/03/1997 12:42 AM 5,229,924 Sign_Of_One.mp2
05/03/1997 12:53 AM 3,353,952 Sorrow.mp2
05/03/1997 12:50 AM 9,309,920 The_Wheel.mp2
4 File(s) 24,998,896 bytes
0 Dir(s) 6,679,371,872,256 bytes free
They’re in MP2 format, which is as ancient as the web itself. I visited the Internet Archive’s IUMA collection, but the songs had been converted to low-resolution MP3 files and “Sorrow” was missing completely. I decided to convert my copies into a modern format, and via a number of conversion programs they were re-sampled, gain-adjusted, and burned to an audio CD, which I am making available for your listening pleasure here (150MB Zip file containing .bin/.cue suitable for use with burning utilities like ImgBurn).
Of course, if you don’t care about having these on high-quality CD, you can get 3 of the 4 songs from the Internet Archive (link above).
Note: As these are simply converted versions of material freely available at the Internet Archive, I don’t see any issues with making them available here. If anyone from Ghost Like Sun objects, simply drop me a line (see the “Contact Info” in the “LINKS” section to the right of this post). Of course, that means I’m going to ask you where the second album went, etc.
