DAT Archives Recovered by dublab Capture 1990s LA Electronic History

From Lustmord to unnamed techno bangers, these tapes survived long after the machines that played them.

When dublab moved into its new building in late 2021, they found a bag of Digital Audio Tapes. Unlabeled, low-key, nearly forgotten, inside were demos, live sets, half-finished ideas, and full-blown mindbenders. No context, no metadata, just snippets of sublimely strange electronic and acoustic sound that Shazam can’t crack. The tapes still played. The transfers came out clean.

Now they’re airing them. Bag Full of DATs — Lost Electronic Music from the 90s, a limited dublab radio series, pulls these recordings into the present. Across the series, fragments rise out of the murk. Lustmord’s low-end pressure drifts into focus, unmistakable. Occasionally, Shazam catches a thread — Paperclip People’s “Throw (Slam’s RTM Mix)” flares up, then vanishes back into the blur. Elsewhere, digital crickets pulse under crumbling textures. A Detroit techno sprint slams in from nowhere, no intro, no warning, just speed and precision. One tape unspools into an entire William S. Burroughs reading, raw and unannounced, like it had been waiting in the dark for someone to press play.

The timing and location matter. These tapes capture the residue of LA’s late-’90s experimental fringe, when clubs like Spaceland, the Smell, Project Blowed, Jabberjaw, and Fais Do-Do blurred lines between IDM, ambient, hip-hop, punk, and noise. dublab had just begun broadcasting in 1999, threading together a loose constellation of producers, record heads, sample fiends, and scene drifters. These weren’t press kits or formal releases. They were test transmissions, backups burned to tape before being forgotten, overwritten, or lost to corrupted drives.

A different kind of field recording has emerged, one culled from digitized storage rather than open air. What used to be tape hiss and background birdsong is now file directories and unmarked folders. Bag Full of DATs offers a glimpse of a future where crate digging means scouring found hard drives. Lost music surfaces not in basements or attics but in the magnetic detritus of obsolete formats.

Digital Audio Tape wasn’t built to last. Decks jammed. Tapes glitched. One bad alignment and your master shredded itself. And unlike vinyl or cassette, DAT didn’t degrade with charm. There was no hiss, no wobble, no surface crackle, just a clean signal or sudden silence. Still, from the early ’90s through the early 2000s, DATs were everywhere behind the scenes. Producers used them to bounce down mixes. DJs recorded sets. Mastering houses requested them. Even pressing plants often demanded DATs as the final delivery format. If you wanted clarity, you used DAT.

This finality, the total loss or survival of the signal, explains why ISC stays rooted in analog sound. Vinyl and tape don’t just store music. They age with it. They stretch, rust, and breathe. Digital disappears. Analog lingers. Thankfully, dublab’s on the case.