Guy Blackman was a 17-year-old Perth/Boorloo boy in 1992 when he starting writing the first chapter of what would become one of Australia’s longest-running independent record labels. He was sneaking into gigs with a fake ID, making his own DIY music zines and watching his pals’ bands pioneer sounds and stories. More than three decades on, music has changed and his record label is evolving. A new chapter is being written.

“This project has been percolating in my head for a long time,” Guy says. “There’s so much Australian music that doesn’t exist in the digital world and deserves to. I wanted to combat the idea that people think everything exists on streaming – there are so many gaps in Australian music and there’s still quite a lot of cultural amnesia going on. I wanted to do a little bit to help rectify that.”

There are few people in Melbourne/Naarm who have done more for the local music scene than Guy Blackman and his partner Ben O’Connor. The pair have put out more than 200 releases on their indie record label, Chapter Music, since Guy moved to the city in the early ’90s. After announcing the end of an era last year – “it’s not like Chapter’s dead and gone; it’s just that we’re not putting out new artists anymore” – Guy found his new “baby” in the form of a sublabel dedicated to digitising and reissuing the music that time (and streaming services) forgot. It’s called Chapter Epilogue, but don’t be fooled – the name sounds like an ending, but it’s more like a beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

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“There’s a real interest among younger fans now of music from the past,” Guys says. “The past and the present are all intertwined in a way that they didn’t used to be. Back in the day, after a record had been out for a while, it was gone. Now, music has so many different lives – it keeps coming back in these successive waves.”

It’s the same when it comes to how we listen to music. As a “physical media kid”, Guy remembers when CDs began taking over vinyl, prompting all the old music heads to lament the change. “Since then, there have been so many successive waves of format change and disruption,” he says. “It’s not like I’m a big flag waver for streaming services or anything. Streaming isn’t always my ideal way of listening to or discovering music. Chapter Epilogue is an archival effort – I just want this music to exist and survive and be discoverable for anyone around the world who comes to it in their own way.”

When it comes to working out who gets the digital reissue treatment, there’s a mix of what Guy thinks will “work in the 21st century” and the Australian music that “people don’t know as much about as they should”. There is, of course, personal taste leading the charge. It is Guy’s baby, after all.

 

 

 

 

 

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Perth band Wash was doing shoegaze in the early ’90s when “no one else was doing shoegaze”. They were buddies of Guy’s, playing at the gigs he was sneaking into, and they’re one of the five artists to be featured in Chapter Epilogue’s first release of digital reissues. “I had this really direct connection to them,” he says. “It was really rewarding to get their demo tape remastered and released as the first thing on Chapter Epilogue. They’re all very dear to me.

“A lot of my music tastes were formed by the Perth music scene, and a lot of that stuff has completely dropped out of public view. So there’s a part of me that’s trying to fight a little bit for some of that Perth music history to get preserved and remembered. But there’s also music from around Australia, and hopefully eventually the world.”

The actual digitising process is more akin to cooking than music making. First, Guy finds an album to reissue – maybe something from his “suitcases of cassettes, 7-inch record collections, CDs and CD-Rs”. Certain formats, like old reel-to-reel tapes, can easily disintegrate, so Guy has to bake them in the oven at a low temperature for a few hours to retrieve the music.

“Sometimes they get a bit sticky and the information gets wiped off the tape as you’re transferring it – we’ve had instances where tapes have started to fall apart in our hands. Sometimes it’s only the vinyl record that exists, so then you’re dealing with static and crackle and scratches as you’re trying to transfer stuff and get rid of all the surface noise. Then there are a lot of tapes that have tape hiss all over them from people recording themselves on these 4-track cassette players in their bedrooms in the ’80s and ’90s.”

 

 

 

 

 

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The scratches and crackles are like wrinkles on the face of an album – some you can paint make-up over; others are part of the history of the moment in which it was made. “It’s kind of romantic – people like that sound,” Guy says. “You don’t want to clean it up too much.”  

Chapter Epilogue is writing a history of music that had been forgotten, up until now, in this new age of listening – an age in which listening to new music has never been easier and yet discovering old music has never been harder. It’s a big history, but maybe some 17-year-old will stumble across a Perth shoegaze band from the ’90s and make a new story out of it.

“It’s an incomplete project,” Guys says. But while it may be impossible to reissue it all, it’s enough to preserve the stories and sounds that deserve to be retold, enough to “show people a bit more of the tapestry and richness of all the different bits of Australian music over the years.”