Groove: Monkey Radio Archive - 1.0 Release!
All recovered tracks are up. With 1,645 songs in rotation, the archive now holds every acquirable, known Monkey Radio track, including two station exclusives recovered from the artists themselves.
I have uploaded the remaining tracks, and removed a handful of duplicates that had sneaked into the mix (e.g. tracks that were added from multiple compilations).
New standouts include:
- Two tracks from Moodorama’s Basement Music.
- DJ Krush’s “To-U-Kyou” (only present on the Japanese pressing of Milight).
- The untitled hidden track from Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz vol. 2.
- A personal favorite addition in this tranche is Samelico’s “Pepper Sweet”: this was an unreleased station exclusive, provided to us directly by the artist himself. You can listen to this one here if you’re curious, hosted on our site with the artist’s permission!
- We also acquired a legitimate copy of Izmar’s “Tingeling” from the artist; this too was only available on the station, and can now be heard here.
This brings us to a grand total of 1,645 songs. While we are still looking for two tracks, this now represents a complete listing of all acquirable, known Monkey Radio tracks!
Statistics
- 395 tracks were only found on vinyl or CD (across 90 albums). Many of these had to be imported, coming to me from Sweden, Great Britain, France, Canada, and Japan.
- 107 tracks (13 albums) were bought from Juno before it shut down permanently.
- 2 known tracks (0.1%) are currently unlocated (Le Blioux and Asphaltmotherflame).
- 2 tracks were lost media, recovered directly from the original artists.
- 1 track was only present on the 12” vinyl pressing. (Another was recovered from vinyl, but has a similar release on a large compilation; the original source was unclear.)
A Labor of Love
The Monkey Radio Archive is an unofficial, unaffiliated tribute to the original station, aiming to faithfully recreate it. All commercially released tracks were purchased from digital storefronts where possible, and as used media otherwise (the intention being to support the artists) and the radio station is run via a service providing the relevant PROs. It is provided ad-free and free of charge, in the same 192k stream the original gave us.
This is not to say that the purchase list is the same one the DJ used! The discovery of the 2005 snapshot of the m3u showed that alternative albums were sometimes used to get to the same tracks (for instance, the Blade soundtrack was used to source Krush’s “Dig That Vibe”).
The Caveats
That said: this effort is incomplete. And almost certainly incorrect.
There are still two Most Wanted tracks out there; if you have information about them, please let me know. Furthermore, after 2006 our information about the station is limited to fan lists and any Current Song the Wayback Machine captured…meaning there are absolutely tracks that slipped detection, or fan-introduced errors that never played at all.
We’ll continue to update the station as new information arrives, but new information only comes from you; if you have notes or recordings from the station, you can contribute to preserving history.
Groove.
In the meanwhile, enjoy! The station is live.