Welcome to Found Music, in which I document “A Thrift Store Journey Through Sound”. This site’s concept is extremely simple: once a week I will post some obscure music that I find in a thrift store. Typically these are lost gems or oddities from the cassette era, though I’ve found a few odd CD-Rs and obscure local releases that will eventually featured. Apologies for the current design; it’s rather basic and will be upgraded soon, as I sort through the concept.
I’ve long been fond of musical oddities. When I was young, I had my time listening to Top 40 music, but soon found myself bored and wandered over to the local college radio station. It blew my tiny little mind: music that I would never dream of hearing on Top 40 radio, stuff with odd names like Echo and the Bunnymen, the Sugarcubes, and Husker Du. My ears weren’t quite ready for what they were hearing, but I could tell that this was something different, and almost forbidden. I became hooked on the idea, and throughout my music collecting years, I sought out the rarities, even for popular bands. I once boasted a Nirvana collection that featured 100+ bootlegs with lots of studio recordings, live performances, and radio appearances, and did the same for the Smashing Pumpkins in the mid-90s. At the same time, I would take chances on random bands at the local record store and often found myself rewarded – I discovered the Pixies this way, years after everyone else, but hey.
Of course, doing this is a lot easier these days. You just plug in a band name on Pandora or Last.FM and bam – you can start skipping around finding analogues to the band’s sound. It misses some of the poetry of what I used to do.
That’s where this blog comes into play. I find lots of weird little obscurities at thrift stores, most of them on cassette, and I’ve always wanted to turn them into MP3s but never had the capability. Until now. I bought a very nice cassette deck for a song a few weeks back, and quickly learned the trick to converting those songs into MP3. Thus was born the idea of this site.
This week’s album showed up last Saturday in a thrift store in Rockville, Maryland. This place is one of my reliable, go-to places for software and music. They’ve supplied me with a few great live bootlegs that may show up on this site as well, but this week I want to share an album by a Maryland band called Quorum.
It’s hard to find much info on this band. I can tell you that some of the members, including lead singer Abdy Beklik, went on to form a new band, Ecstasy, that performed some Quorum songs. You can check out the Ecstasy version of a Quorum song called Strong Machine (which appears on this album) here. I’d love to get in touch with these guys sometime and find out their story, but it appears their last album came out in 1999.
As for the sound, I’d say it has a strong 80s alternative vibe, but it’s hard to really compare to any one band. I’d say if you like some of the bands I mentioned above, you’d probably like this one. I really, really enjoyed this album, actually. Quite the pleasant surprise. So please, do enjoy the music and let me know if you have any idea how to find these guys.
Track list:
Side A
- Strong Machine
- Destiny
- Hey Yeah Yeah
- Only Way
- Wonder Why
- In a Daze
Side B
- When I’m Alone
- This Generation
- Falling
- I Pray
- Crying for Help
Found Music 
