And here's betting that "Music to Relax By in Your Barcalounger" is not in your personal collection.
But that sort of vintage "product media," created for consumers, makes Blair Sterrett and Tyrone Davies go weak in the knees. They already have a storage unit in Ogden, Sterrett's hometown, stuffed with music, film, books, equipment and other scraps of media detritus that our throwaway society has deemed inconsequential. On Saturday at the NoBrow coffee shop in Salt Lake City, the duo will stage an exhibit they call "Excavations," when they will screen "delightfully bizarre" films and demonstrate some of their obsolete media formats, such as a wax cylinder player designed by Thomas Edison.
To Sterrett, founder of the Lost Media Archive, and Davies, his collaborator, such stuff is the sociological equivalent of gold, a fascinating blend of history and anthropology.
"It's like solving a mystery sometimes," said Davies, 29, a Salt Lake City filmmaker and freelance editor who met Sterrett, 30, when they were Mormon missionaries in Taiwan. Sterrett, a comic book artist, is temporarily living in Vermont while he attends the Center for Cartoon Studies. But he and Davies dream of someday birthing the contents of their storage unit into a media museum where people could view the development of media devices and products over time.
Davies also runs the Free Form Film Festival, which screens outsider and experimental films. In collaboration with Trasa Urban Arts, Davies is launching yet another project, screening selections from the festival month at NoBrow in a monthly event called Out/X. The first screening is Feb. 17 at 7 p.m.
Sterrett is more enamored of print and audio, especially outsider music, created by people who aren't classically trained but whose work is notable for its personality and emotion, whether it's brilliant or awful. He is an occasional contributor to the "365 Days Project" on radio station WFMU's "Beware of the Blog," which offers a daily clip of outsider music. One that Sterrett posted Tuesday is of a Latino boy named Antonio Eugenio Martinez singing "Puño de Tierra."
"This was found at an old antique shop near the railroad tracks in downtown Ogden, Utah. I don't speak any Spanish and know absolutely nothing about Antonio Eugenio Martinez. All I understood was that little face on the record's label," Sterrett wrote on the site. "The music turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be and I fell in love with it instantly. I even played it while DJing at my friend Tyrone Davies' wedding reception."
Outsider music is "definitely worth listening to" because it's original and creative, unlike so much popular music, Sterrett said. "It's extremely personal. It's not watered down by 20 people in a studio."
Sterrett also collects tapes from telephone answering machines, another obsolete media format, because they provide tantalizing clues about people and their time.
"They're little snapshots into people's lives. . . . It just seems more of a time capsule of human existence," he said.
New life for old stuff
* SAMPLES OF "forgotten media" from the Lost Media Archive, including film, audio and equipment, will be exhibited Saturday at 7 p.m. at NoBrow Coffee and Tea (inside Kayo Gallery), 315 E. 300 South, Salt Lake City. The event is free.
