Cassette Sunrise · 1999
Debut LP. Eleven songs bounced to a borrowed four-track over one weekend. There’s hiss on every track and we left all of it in.
Unofficial fan page, made by tape traders, for tape traders. The band doesn’t run this and probably doesn’t know it’s here.
The listening booth
Fan-taped, fan-shared. Click a title to cue it up. The loops are bounced to 8-bit right here in the page; the real tapes still live in a shoebox.
The band
From a basement, 1998
Neon Divide came together in the autumn of 1998, in a basement with shag carpet stapled to the walls for soundproofing and a space heater that hummed in the key of A. Four kids, one borrowed synth, and a four-track that ate more takes than it ever kept.
They played all-ages halls and record-shop back rooms for five years, pressed three albums and an EP onto short runs of CD-Rs, and then everyone moved away. No label, no video, no reunion. Just tapes, passed hand to hand, and this little discography we keep for them.
Who’s who
- Mara Vex: vocals, tape loops, and the good synth
- Dell Corrigan: guitar, solder smoke, backing howls
- Toby “Sync” Nakamura: drum machine and a shoebox of patch cables
- Nadia Okafor: bass, theremin, and driving the van
Discography
Four transmissions, none of them easy to find. Covers drawn from memory, the originals were a photocopier and a lot of nerve.
Static in the Stairwell · 2000
The cold one. Cut in an actual stairwell for the reverb, mixed at three in the morning, released on a run of three hundred CD-Rs.
Answering Machine Heart · 2001
Six songs and a hidden track. The one people actually own, and the reason anyone still emails the street team.
Basement Aurora · 2003
The last transmission before everyone scattered. Louder, sadder, and somehow brighter. If you only hear one, hear this.
Tour dates
| Date | City | Venue | Door |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fri 12 Mar 1999 | Portland, OR | The Rec Room (all-ages) | $5 |
| Sat 20 Mar 1999 | Olympia, WA | the veterans' hall | $6 |
| Fri 02 Apr 1999 | Sacramento, CA | The Filament Room | $5 |
| Sat 17 Apr 1999 | Boise, ID | The Transistor | $7 |
| Fri 30 Apr 1999 | Denver, CO | The Snake Pit | $6 |
These are the shows we taped. If you kept one, send us a copy, that’s how half this archive got here.
From the b-side
from “Answering Machine Heart” (2001)
You left a message on my heart
thirty seconds, then the dial tone.
I played it back until the tape wore thin
and the whole machine went neon.
-- transcribed by ear from a fourth-generation tape; corrections welcome
Join the street team
We can’t pay you. We can mail you a photocopied zine, a sticker, and a tape when there’s a new one. Flyer your town, tape the shows, tell two friends. That’s the whole job.
Grab the tracks
MP3 archive
Fan-encoded from the tapes at a heroic 128 kbps. Right-click, Save As. Mirror it if you can, and please don’t hotlink.
These buttons don’t go anywhere, this is a shrine, not a server. The real files pass hand to hand, the way they always did.