EPISODE · Jul 11, 2018 · 29 MIN

Great Lost Albums

from Ongoing History of New Music · host Curiouscast

I hate not finishing something I start…for example, if I pick up a novel, I’m determined to finish the thing even if I hate it… But then I look around the house and I see all the jobs that I didn’t complete…organizing the basement…filing all CDs and records…that little project in the back corner of the garden that—well, I don’t even remember what I was trying to do there… Then there’s my novel…I’ve wrote two chapters in a flurry of creativity year ago—and I haven’t touched it since…it’s been so long that the file was written in WordPerfect…I hope I can still open it…I’ll get around to checking that…. All this unfinished business really bothered me—until I saw something that made me feel so much better… It was in china...north of Beijing is a giant amusement park that from the highway looks a lot like Disneyland…it’s called wonderland…it was supposed to attract millions of visitors from all across the country… But then in 1998, investors pulled out…120 acres of half-finished, abandoned, fairytale-themed amusement park…it was so weird…all this time and money and labour put into something only to never see it actually work out… Which brings me to this…just because you start on an album doesn’t mean you’ll ever finish it…and even if you do, it doesn’t mean it’ll ever get released… There are dozens and dozens and dozens of “lost” albums sitting in vaults and on hard drives all over the world…who made them?...and what happened?...let’s take a look—and maybe even a listen… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices