Groove: Tracklist Updates!
Asphaltmotherflame’s “Breathing Over Kiss” finally joins the rotation, six Flying Lotus bootlegs step out of live play, and only one known track remains missing from the archive.
For a long while, “Asphaltmotherflame - Breathing Over Kiss” was unobtainium. That has changed.
The track shows up on all the authoritative sources: it’s in the 2002 and 2005 playlists on the Wayback Machine. You can see it on Last.fm, scrobbled by Monkey Radio listeners. A diligent Wayback search turns up old websites referencing a tantalizing list of tracks across multiple albums. Searching the Internet Archive found a handful of demos to prove the band existed, but the Monkey Radio track of record, “Breathing Over Kiss,” was absent.
Two Breakthroughs
For one thing, a former Monkey Radio artist reached out to me with a folder of Streamripper-created files from the station, recorded over a couple of days in 2003. After normalization it aligned perfectly with our known tracklist of the era, but it contained gold: a recording of AMF’s track, right there, tagged and everything.
It was late by about a day.
See, in the meanwhile I had chased down the original artist, who let us know that the band name had changed, but the music had not. You can find the entire catalog of the former Asphaltmotherflame on Bandcamp under Century Tuner. Don’t get me started on the fact that, in spite of a verbatim search for the track name, Bandcamp didn’t deign to inform me that the track was alive and well. The full hunt is written up in The Hunt: Finding the Tracks.
Not All Addition
In the interests of cleanliness, though, we’ve disabled six Flying Lotus tracks:
- Wombat College
- Let It Go
- Ankle Boy Backyard
- Dirty Chopsticks
- Litermeter
- Another Night on the Roof
These six are technically bootlegs: Flying Lotus has never (to my knowledge) acknowledged them, making them inappropriate for Live365. Furthermore, they only appear on less authoritative sources; I can’t affirmatively prove that Monkey Radio played them. Obviously, given the lack of primary sources post-2006, we do include some fan-attested content, but the combination makes these good candidates to pull from live play. They remain on the track spreadsheet and provenance documents, however, for those looking to replicate the research or build a copy of the station.
State of Play
With the addition of Century Tuner - “Breathing Over Kiss,” we have every known individual track in the rotation. The lone holdout is a DJ megamix by LeBlioux of sacreBLIOUX, a (probably) Canadian DJ who provided the soundtrack for a San Francisco party in 2001. Given the rules Live365 has for hosting mixes, there may be some massaging needed to host that file if and when we find it, so stay tuned. In the meanwhile (barring new primary sources), enjoy the most authoritative list of Monkey Radio tracks on the internet today.
Want to replicate, disprove, or improve upon my work? Please join the party!
If you have an old streamdump of Monkey Radio, a copy of some of LeBlioux’s missing mixes (!), or happen to be the original Monkey Radio DJ himself (hi, big fan), please hit me up on Reddit. I’d love to make this recreation of our favorite station even better.