Welcome to the MAGNETIC STATE CASSETTE ARCHIVE.

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What started innocently in 1994 as a four-track lo-fi cassette recording social club, THE MAGNETIC STATE CASSETTE ARCHIVE blossomed over subsequent years into an on-going collaborative art project between friends, music producers & multi-instrumentalists Brian Ledwidge Flynn, Niall Carey and Stephen Nolan [aka FIVE-Ø]. A musical 'wrecking crew' of sorts, feverishly writing and producing music without rigid stylistic boundaries.

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This archive is home to the vast array of eclectic pop-art-ephemera that these three culture vultures have created since the formation of their enduring collaboration. 

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All albums and pieces are recorded to cassette tape and stored in the Magnetic State Cassette Archive [Dortmund, Germany] as it is arguably the compact cassette tape that has shown itself to be amongst the most time-tested, robust and future-proof of storage media.  

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Due to the sheer volume of diverse collections that have resulted from this on-going 'Recording Club', the M.S.C.A. was formed to contextualise the pieces into themed albums & entities according to how they reflect the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics of a particular cultural epoch, resulting in what could be considered an alternate timeline of popular music.

The resulting 'Timeline' is a slanted lo-fi reality in which bands vaugely resembling those from our own timeline are somehow altered: 'Woodstock' becomes 'Mudstock' and The Fab Four are now known as 'The Beagles' to name but two examples.    

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Through the project are threaded reoccurring themes, lyrics, musical quotations and other subtle connections suggesting a larger mystery hidden within a vast cypher. 

The lo-fi aesthetic with which the trio started has been maintained by the use of cassette technology throughout the recording, mixing and mastering stages in addition to embracing and exploiting the technological shortcomings inherent in conducting complex triangulated recording sessions over the internet. 

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The archive is home to dozens of  projects resulting from this fruitful, unfettered and often tongue-in-cheek collaboration. On this page are just a few examples of works thus-far produced and archived in the M.S.C.A.  

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To keep track of such an unwieldy catalogue, an exhaustive online portal was created where visitors can search the specially built database for sketches, collections,  lyrics, lead sheets and many more resources relating to subsequently archived pieces of the edifice.   

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In the current technological climate we feel it necessary to express that no Artificial Intelligence has been employed in the composition [music / lyric / performance] of the works contained in the archive. 

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COPYRIGHT 1994–2024 • FLYNN / CAREY / NOLAN [ & CO-CONSPIRATORS ]