July 8, 1989: a young Chicago music fan named Aadam Jacobs slipped a compact cassette recorder into his pocket and went to Dreamerz to see a band from Washington play their first Chicago show. The band was Nirvana. He kept going — club after club, for decades — and the archive grew past ten thousand recordings: The Cure, Pixies, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, R.E.M.
A volunteer preservation project is digitizing the whole shelf and uploading it to the Internet Archive, one show at a time. Audio streams straight from Archive.org — no ads, no accounts, no rehosting. AJ Tapes is a player built for that shelf.
Explore the collection on Archive.org →
