FINALLY SOMETHING TO REPLACE BOWLING

Fully Stoked, Happily Ever After

Matthew — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:06:36 +0000

Discovered this 30 second, mind-numbing treasure on a video tape this afternoon. A bunch of 90’s teens go on the Vicki! show to be made over by way cool Brian Austin Green and then Vicki! humiliates herself Tyra-style, rapping with ‘tude.

[YouTube Video]

There’s No More Disco Left

Matthew — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 05:04:30 +0000

My main thing right now, besides quietly supporting the balloon and coordinating gift industry, is digitizing every last analog item I own. Some, like my vinyl and cassette collection, are worthwhile endeavors that I will enjoy for many years to come. Others, like the one posted below, will be for the historians to decide. I basically hold on to anything I come into contact with that amuses or bewilders me in any way. I feel the time is right for me to start sharing what I’ve been saving.

Let’s all go back to 1996, a dark time when disco had to live in the shadows:

[YouTube Video]

I’m not sure where to start. This was taped during my high school speech class 13 years ago. Our teacher had the foresight to have us bring in a video tape and film our speeches, with the idea that watching ourselves squirm would make us all better public speakers. I doubt this worked, but it did accomplish capturing the mind-blowing moment when this disco speech was delivered. Instead of only haunting the dreams of the 30 or so kids in the class that afternoon, it now has the capability to reach everyone with a decent internet connection. Perhaps disco can get back into the picture, afterall.

And why do I have this?? I promise this isn’t me giving a speech about love and brickhouses. Mine was about advertising and was much drier and propless. Since I was responsible, I brought a VHS tape to class. Many did not. In addition to my own speech, I was able to get three others. I was also able to snag a little memorabilia. Thank you, Chris.

You Already Have Way Too Many Downloads

Matthew — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:17:01 +0000

OK, obviously, our ambition to make this blog thing worthwhile fizzled out even faster than anyone expected. I apologize. For us to continue, I suppose some tweaks will need to be made, perhaps we’ll add photos of celebrities without makeup.

As many of you know, asaurus.org started out as the home of Asaurus Records (still is, actually: asaurus.org/records). The label would have turned 8 years old this past December. To celebrate our third anniversary in 2004, we released a special 3-disc boxed set entitled You Already Have Way Too Many CDRs. It included a sampler disc featuring a new song from everyone on our roster at the time, as well as a disc of outtakes and a disc of our bands doing covers of songs they considered “guilty pleasures”. In true Asaurus fashion, it wasn’t released until February of 2005.

When we started up this new website, one of things we wanted to do was celebrate, archive, and share the history and music of the label. Our first offering is the complete boxed set. This may or may not crash our servers:

Click here to download the boxset, including a PDF of the booklet.

You’ll find lots to love about this collection, please let us know your favorites in the comments. Hopefully it won’t take one of us another month to post again.

Finally something new.

Matthew — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:39:25 +0000

Six months ago I promised something new at asaurus.org after the unfortunate closing of Asaurus Records. My plan was to get things up and running by August, but damn if I didn’t enjoy my new freedom a little too much. It was never my intention to close our beloved label only to start another “music blog”. These events are totally unrelated, and the only reason Finally Something to Replace Bowling is on asaurus.org is I think folks who enjoyed our music will also enjoy what we’re going to attempt to do here. And what is that, exactly?

Honestly, it is only halfway thought out so far, but the bulk of this new site, run by the founders of Asaurus Records, Matthew and Corey, will feature regularly posted music-centric essays about our lives and how music has shaped our experiences. We will not be tastemaking. We are not afraid to talk about bands that everyone already knows and loves. We’ll also dig deep and share the music that is wrongly underappreciated. What you won’t get is a few sentences a day and a link to an MP3. You’ll get thoughtful, possibly entertaining essays and articles about music and about being music lovers. We’ll be going back to the records we loved as children all the way to our most recent discoveries. This is where we are choosing to start.

Much like Asaurus Records, we are starting out with low expectations but a determination to keep doing things the way we want to do them and hope people find they like what we have to offer. Since we ran a label for 7 years and many of you coming here were fans of our releases, we’ll also be offering free downloads of unheard music from our archives, plus our hard-to-find releases. Our label website will remain online indefinitely, as it is the best resource for info on our bands and releases.

If you can forgive a shaky start, I think for the sake of getting this thing moving forward, we’ll just start posting and work the kinks out as we go. I hope you find asaurus.org a nice place to visit.