In the 1980’s and 1990’s there was a superb, if somewhat irregular magazine named Concertina & Squeezebox. One of the ways in which the editor, Joel Cowan, raised funds was by the occasional issue of tapes of reader contributed music. The magazine is, sadly, long gone but by the efforts of Ed Delaney the music on these tapes can be heard again. The quality of the sound varies from poor to good, as you’d expect of such home-produced tapes, but much of the music is excellent from very talented musicians, in some cases no longer with us, so it’s good to hear once again Pat Robson and Hugh Blake, for instance. Ed also prepared the pages which describe and download the music. The ICA Committee thank Ed for his hard work and his allowing us to host it for him.
Click on an image to go to each tape
Ed Delaney writes:
These recordings were submitted by subscribers of Concertina & Squeezebox Magazine over several years and sold on cassette tape as a fund raiser for the magazine. Joel Cowan, editor at the time, compiled and distributed the recorded contributions on these four cassette tapes. I have digitized my set and provide them here as a resource for interested concertina and accordion enthusiasts. The story of the magazine can probably be found elsewhere on the internet, but this collection represents a great audio sample of the wonderful variety of music the readers of the magazine were (and surely are today) making with their various squeezeable instruments.
The International Concertina Association has graciously offered to host this collection. If you spot anything that needs attention, please contact the Webmaster
An informal survey of people who submitted items for the tape indicated that no one had copyright issues with us freely distributing these recordings. If you are one of the contributors and have a concern, please contact the webmaster.
Each tape has its own directory and index, so once you click on an image below you will be taken to the contents of that tape. The contents were scanned from the original liner notes.
At the bottom of each set is a link you can use to download the whole tape, with the html index page for it.
Technical notes
I converted the cassettes to mp3 files, and scanned the liner notes. I used a basic OCR (optical character reconition) program to convert them to text, and made index files with links to the audio. The OCR process was kind of messy, so if you find any problems with the text, let us know and we’ll try to fix it. I did very little editing of the sound files as they came off the tapes.
For the techno-weenies out there, I used my Marantz PMD221 tape recorder/player, and an Mbox2 audio interface to record a set of wav files which were then converted to mp3 using the Lame encoder.
PLEASE NOTE that these tapes are no longer available from the address shown on the liner notes. Attempting to contact C&S at the address shown would be futile.
Best Regards,
Ed Delaney
March, 2009
Additional technical note
In 2021, ICA webmaster Colin Whyles restored and improved these recordings to repair noise, wow, flutter and other damage as far as possible.