GUP SOUND ARCHIVES

For me it all started with an MP3 file I had about twenty years ago. I'm not even sure where it had came from but presumably the internet had played a role. Melbourne band Damaged live on a sleepy Sunday night in Canberra. It was early. All  E.P tracks.
The recording borders on ridiculous. The band perform at breakneck speed, every track runs through twice as fast as the records with the aggression and stop/start timing only those guys could bring. But the sound, my lord the sound. This isn't your normal microphone into a walkman or home Handicam scenario synonymous with those times. This was obviously what traders and bootleggers refer to as a “Soundboard recording”

Turns out this gig was at the Terrace bar(Housed in a beautiful Enrico Taglietti building that now only the back half survives, also home at the time to canberra businesses of note Impact records and electric shadows), it was from a gig in 1993 and the man who recorded it was GUP. I knew that name. Gup was the short dreadlocked man I'd seen mixing Alchemist shows when i was a kid. Pictured with a photo alongside the band members on the inner sleeves of all the alchemist records like a fifth member but listed as “live sound”. He was obviously important.
I would talk about this damaged recording to anyone who would listen. A lot of friends of mine had known him, we had some of his old equipment at my place of employment, at the time I was still doing live sound and lights.
Someone at a gig once drunkenly told me “He recorded everything man” The words swam in my head.

I had to find them. I needed to hear more of it, and I wanted to digitise any tapes I could for future preservation. Magnetic tape stock is deteriorating, these things were never made to last this long.

I asked around for years, people hadn't seen him for a while, leads went nowhere, I'm sure people were a bit cagey or questioned my intentions. Maybe they didn't care.

I would reach out to friends and post on facebook once a year just chasing it again, it never left my mind. I would get little clues or snippets when i ran into old friends, it was mentioned he had been unwell for a while. My mind wandered, Deadline 2025 was  fast approaching. I had to find these vulnerable tapes.

March 2025: I was having a beer with Joel Green (drummer and vocalist in canberra legends armoured angel and currently playing in witchskull), we had organised to do a trade, Joel has the most extensive collection of Motorhead records i’ve ever seen and turns out I had a variant he didn’t have yet. I in turn received the one thing I love the most, Old Canberra gig fliers.

Joel played me an old armoured angel rehearsal tape in his shed. I had just started working in the public service late in the previous year. It was my dream job I had been lusting after for years. Digitising and archiving legacy formats of physical media all day every day on high end equipment that would excite any gearhead or audiophile..

I offered my services if he ever wanted to digitise these tapes.I had already learned so much in my first few months in my new job and people seemed to be taking my archival pestering a lot more seriously since I'd been doing it professionally.

Joel told me he had some other tapes that needed doing. My heart raced, I felt sick in the stomach.Joel had the Gupsound tapes.

The first batch of tapes, Mostly the Armoured angel/Alchemist portion of the collection.

Joel and Gup were obviously friends back in the day. Joel knew about the tapes and was passionate about making sure they were preserved and cared for and figured he would know someone who could digitise them so he had taken them on.

Again I offered my time and knowledge.

Joel informed me there were roughly 500 tapes, far more than I ever could have imagined. Not a chance I could do this at work. One side of a tape before or after work every day would take years. It would have to be done at home.
I had some gear I'd been using, cobbled together cheap stuff, mostly bought second hand, my monitors and my headphones had both recently ceased to work. 

My Sound archivist mentor Cam Rees told me my gear wasnt good enough. 

He was right. This had to be done properly.
Cam lent me some gear for which I am eternally grateful. I bought some new monitors, some new headphones and a new SSD hard drive for the project, I was pretty used to passion projects costing me large amounts of money by this stage. I stocked up on q tips and isopropyl to clean the heads after every side. I removed the Front Lid off my Tape deck so I could easily adjust and tweak the azimuth for every tape, to ensure perfect alignment of the playback head to the tape tracks and ensure I wasn't losing any high end in the transfer.

There's such a wide assortment of recordings in the collection. Yes there's a lot of Metal/Punk (and the 1000 sub genres contained within) but also some rap,reggae and corporate covers bands.There's Finish Jazz groups and some first nations groups. There's the venues to be expected like Terrace, Terminus, Asylum and uni bar but also Lakeside/AITSIS and some gigs on farms or as far out as Nerrandera. There's tapes from bands that were big and had a large recorded output and there's bands that never even released a demo. There's cover songs that I didn't know favourite bands of mine did and there's earlier and different versions of songs i've known in their finished form for decades. The tapes are meticulously labelled with Venue and date, spanning from mid 1990 with the latest i've found being from 1996. There is a few tapes from the 80s mostly centered around young docteurs(the band gup played drums in).Tapes are all in surprisingly good condition presumably stored well over the years. Further to this i have had no issues so far with common cassette tape problems, dried leaders, missing felt pads or wow/flutter. The Cassettes are almost all BASF superchrome Type II Cassettes at 100 minute length (50 minutes per side).

All tapes are being Digitised at 96khz / 24 bit depth to IASA guidelines on Ngunnawal and Ngambri lands. 

I've kept a detailed spreadsheet of bands, venues and dates etc. I can filter the spreadsheet by Band, Venue or year to obtain relevant lists. Files will be stored in 3 separate locations for digital security (With Gup, Joel and myself)

Where to from here? I don't know. What's important is these cassette tapes are being digitised before it's too late. Im not sure yet what Gup wants to do beyond the digitisation of them (if anything.) Presumably we will reach out to all the bands and see if they would like a copy of the files relevant. I'm hopeful I will get to meet Gup shortly for an interview for my archives to obtain further information relevant to the project. Maybe we can do a website with some of the recordings depending on being granted permissions from the bands involved.
It’s important for me to note that nothing will be done publicly with these files without the permission of the bands involved.
I would however love to do an LP of the highlights though there's a lot of them. I'm hoping one day I can convince one of the national collecting institutions to take the files on. I just wanted to make sure the tapes were safe and Gups legacy was given the respect it deserved.

As I write this I'm roughly 70 tapes into the collection, approximately 116 hours spent Digitising in my little spare bedroom in Queanbeyan. I turn off my cassette deck at work, grab a beer from supabarn and pickup my little boy from Daycare and go home and turn on the cassette deck there. 

The Damaged tape that started this whole thing for me hasn't appeared in the collection… Yet.

Nathan. 26/04/2025