Saving Tape has had a long and productive relationship with Marc Percansky and Magic Marc Productions.  The most notable collaboration being the Billy Hallquist Basement Tapes, in which we digitized and curated a large archive of reel to reel audio recordings from the long career of Minnesota musician Billy Hallquist.

Our current ongoing project is the digitization of a series of demos, studio recordings, and live performances by notable and prolific singer songwriter Earl Kayoss. Earl claims on his website that he has written over 700 songs! This particular archive of audio cassettes contains chronological demo recordings dating back to 1975 (when Earl was 17 years old) and spanning all the way through late 1995.

We are digitizing the audio in a total of 9 batches over the course of several months. Saving Tape is indexing each song as an individual archive quality .WAV audio file.  Some cassettes from recording musicians present unique and exciting challenges which require extra special treatment: some cassettes were recorded on a 4 track portable studio, which we digitized using a professional grade 4 track cassette deck, simultaneously outputting 4 discreet audio tracks (giving Earl the opportunity to remix and master these long lost recordings) as well as quick mix-downs (so the songs can be heard completely, as originally recorded!)

Magic Marc is curating the new digital collection on behalf of Mr. Kayoss and has posted a wealth of background information on his website.  There you can also find links to the Life On Mars band camp site, which is one of Earl Kayoss’ most well known projects.