Foustland

I spent a couple hours with Aaron Stengel at the Flint Underground Music Archive vault and was blown away by the amount of stuff he has gone through and organized as well as the stuff he has yet to get to. I was given unprecedented access into the inner workings of an historical archive,  for the Hall Show Documentary.

I can totally relate to the feeling that Aaron must get when he accepts a collection from someone in the Flint punk scene, having worked in records management for the largest pharmaceutical company for a number of years.  I have seen boxes of stuff that needed to have a level of order placed to it, but that was what I did for my living.  Aaron is doing this in his free time, preserving a piece of history that he, I and many others in Flint in the 1980s and 90s witnessed, supported, and participated in.

So, here is some of what I learned about the process.  Aaron will receive a box or boxes full of stuff.  Since he is really focusing on a small window of time, mainly the 80's through the early 00's he filters out the stuff not in his current scope and organizes the rest.

Depending on the type of media, Aaron will get it from the analog form into a digital form using audio capture, video capture, and image scanning.  The various types of media he gets are as follows

• Audio
  • Cassette Tapes
  • Vinyl Records
  • Compact Disk (not so common)
• Video
  • VHS
  • DVD (not so common)
  • Beta
  • Film (there is rumor of some 8mm film floating around out there, but it isn't yet in the archive)
• Paper
  • Promotional Flyers
  • Tickets
  • Business Cards
  • Band Promotional Materials
  • Set Lists
  • Zines
  • Contracts (The rider for the first Black Flag appearance in 1984 is pretty funny, it was posted on the board at Wyatt Earps for a while for all to see and get a chuckle out of)
  • Miscellaneous notes posted around hall shows
• Photographs

Depending on what part of the archive Aaron want's to tackle, he takes a batch processing approach to the digitization of the original material.  This is why it seems that there is a lag in getting stuff updated on the site.  For audio, he first locates the best source material to work from.  Usually this is a tape that hasn't seen much play.  He hits record on his computer, He is using Sony Vegas for this and play on the tape deck.  Once the tape is recorded in to the computer, he marks regions and dumps those out into a batch ofmp3 files.  The process goes on from there, as he needs to mark up the ID3 tagging for the mp3 files, and get them all organized and the file names compliant for the upload to archive.org, which is where all of the FUMA files are stored.  I really only scratched the surface on the actual process in my explanation here.  In fact, there are over 15 different steps that Aaron goes through before recordings make their way online.

I can easily say that without the access I have been graciously permitted to the content within the archive, I wouldn't have enough material to do a documentary in the proper way.  Nobody likes just watching a bunch of talking heads remember their past.  The aural and visual evidence of this past is such an important part of creating a good story.  So in advance of everything I just want to throw a heart felt Thanks to anyone who has contributed stuff to the FUMA.