The Rave Archive Mixtape Collection is Back

One of the largest internet archives of the classic days of the rave scene, RaveArchive.com disappeared off the internet for much of 2016 and 2017. With its focus on the early North American underground, this was a pretty big loss to those who want to save something of the foundations of electronic music in mixtape form – the (more or less) precise format it was originally preserved and disseminated in.

The current site functions as an elegant front-end with the masses of audio and zine archives uploaded at the InternetArchive – a sometimes slow and clunky but plausible solution to the problem we pointed out in the last issue of 5 Mag of technology increasingly (and rather pointlessly) wiping whole sectors of history off the internet.

Consider, for instance, a mix uploaded in 2007, which was likely embedded on a webpage in some kind of a Flash player. Few browsers handle Flash with ease today, and in a year Chrome will remove Flash support altogether, and even Adobe is moving on. Lots of shit is disappearing; lots of other shit already did when RealAudio was eclipsed by Flash in the first place.

But anyway, here’s the archive, and here’s one of the 1700+ items in the RaveArchive collection I hadn’t heard before, Daft Punk Live In Borealis Montepellier: