Dena has asked me to help distribute the best cassette collection ever to the Peake-o-sphere. That's right, we have the cassette collection of our favorite master archivist right here, and you can have a piece it for your very own!

What I've got is three different crates of cassettes. Below are high resolution photos of the crates, from different angles in case you can't make out a title in one of the shots.

Sure, there are some regular commercially produced tapes in here, but for the most part they are either compilations that Thomas made himself, or impossibly obscure (and killer) albums from across the spectrum of music. As with just about everything Thomas did, just the cases themselves are often unique creations.

Genres and artists include:
- movie soundtracks
- free jazz, no wave
- old ATL punk/HC
- WREK shows like Pete Rentz's "Dead on the Heavy Funk"
- underground radio shows (non-WREK)
- Reich, Rolnik, Redd Kross
- Mingus, Mayfield, Minor Threat
- Sun Ra, Snakefinger, Skinpops

... and so on. Take a look, it's stunning!

Some appear to be mixtapes that friends made for Thomas, and I especially hope that those people will get word of this and will be able to get those tapes.

So, you've looked at the pictures, and you've identified some cassettes that you want, now what? Contact me ( via our submit@peakecast.org email here ) and let me know the title (or whatever the identifying info on the cassette spine says) for each cassette that you're interested in.

I will collect all of the requests together and work on distributing these in October. Just to head off one likely request, I can't digitize the cassettes and offer them up that way, but if someone out there already has experience doing that and wants to work with me on that, I'm game!

The pictures are below, grouped by the three crates. Enjoy!

CRATE 1

TFP cassette collection Crate 1 (left view)

TFP cassette collection Crate 1 (center view)

TFP cassette collection Crate 1 (right view)

CRATE 2

TFP cassette collection Crate 2 (left view)

TFP cassette collection Crate 2 (center view)

TFP cassette collection Crate 2 (right view)

CRATE 3 (actually two boxes)

TFP cassette collection Crate 3 part 1 (with flash)

TFP cassette collection Crate 3 part 1 (no flash)

TFP cassette collection Crate 3 part 2 (with flash)

TFP cassette collection Crate 3 part 2 (no flash)

Happy hunting!

In fact, Thomas played host to the band on their Atlanta visit, and interviewed them for an article in Stomp and Stammer. Jean Smith has her tour diaries and notes online, and has several excerpts from the article that Thomas wrote:

Mecca Normal’s aesthetic body politic shares a rare ability, a la Czech novelist-in-self-imposed-exile Milan Kundera -- to make the political personal. ... Lester’s guitars are as inventive as ever. Gracefully attacking and lulling, he has captured Smith’s emotional range in strings.

For more, see Jean's 1996 tour diary here (Atlanta entries are about halfway down) and the general Mecca Normal website here.

For your reference pleasure, we have Thomas' original playlist sheet, scanned in and here in PDF form.

We're now one full year into this podcast, and loving it immensely.

By the way, if you haven't already heard about the Beautify the Beltline project being conducted on the morning of Saturday October 9th, in memory of Thomas, please email us ASAP for more info.

Enjoy!

And if you've got something, click on "how to submit" above and we'll take it from there.  If you haven't yet dug into your cassette collection, please do now!