In the early 1980s, a cheap cassette deck was all a Toronto band needed to make a record. Demos were dubbed at home, sold at shows, traded through the mail and played on campus radio, and most never made it to vinyl. This project gathers those tapes from Toronto and the surrounding Southern Ontario scene.

The range is wide. There’s the home-recorded art rock of Bruce PM’s Makeshift, made in a North York hair salon basement, and Dis Band’s Gone Dead Out, by a band formed with a built-in expiry date. There’s the hardcore of Direct Action, Wrath, Sudden Impact and the Nunfuckers, and the early thrash demos of Slaughter and Sacrifice. Early demos from Chalk Circle and Boys Brigade sit beside Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet’s first tape, poetry and song from Robert Priest, and Terry Watada’s jazz cassette Saigon Dreaming. Two compilations catch dozens of the city’s bands in a single sweep: Sounds From The Streets: 12 Toronto Bands and SMASH IT UP – Oral-Aural, the cassette companion to the Toronto fanzine Smash It Up.

Part of what makes the project special is the radio. Alongside the music are CKLN-FM interviews and broadcasts from the period, including Sacrifice and Slaughter on the station’s fundraising drives and Sudden Impact interviewed at the DMZ on July 20, 1985.

The project draws in part on the cassette collection of Tim Keele, who hosted Who’s Who and other programs at CFNY-FM from 1980 to 1982. In December 1982 he hosted the Sounds From The Streets showcase at 100 Bond Street, he was acknowledged on SMASH IT UP – Oral-Aural, and he now advises the Museum of Canadian Music.