The Loop : Various Artists - Not One Light Red : A Desert Extended

Various Artists - Not One Light Red : A Desert Extended (2004?)

I started working at The Blaze 1260AM my freshman year after getting an e-mail to all the new journalism students about a "general interest" meeting the 2nd week of school. The directors all spoke about their departments, and despite coming in there wanting to DJ, I realized I was also generally interested in promotions. I volunteered myself to the promotions department and met up with the director and a few others on a Saturday afternoon to be part of a tailgate near Lot 59 and the stadium for a football game. We met at the station early on and packed up all of our promo items : stickers, posters and sampler CDs, mostly. I was fascinated by the fact that labels would just give out boxes of CDs to us and got REALLY excited when Jackie said it was cool if I took a local music compilation called "Not One Light Red : A Desert Extended" out of several boxes they gave us, namely because it featured The Format (and their very first recording) I remember feeling instantly cool and going home to listen to something I had gotten while "working", and fascinated still that "working" can involve music and local bands.

I listened to this record non-stop the next few months, however in adding them to my iPod, it didn't pop up the band names, just "various artists". Several years later, until today, I didn't really even realize who all was on it, even though I had listened to it so many times before. The local label that made this compilation, Sunset Alliance, had previously put together another compilation called "Not One Light Red : A Modified Document", which featured live performances from the downtown art space, including a track from Jim Adkins' side project, Go Big Casino. For this, they decided to integrate music from across the country and the world between tracks from local bands like Before Braille, Reuben's Accomplice, Fine China, The Go Reflex and Fivespeed, all bands that I would become incredibly familiar with later on while hosting a local music radio show.

The non-AZ bands included groups like Cursive (whoa!), Recover, The Good Life and even a Swedish guy named Kristofer Astrom and Hidden Truck (by far my favorite song on this compilation). Like so many of the records I heard that first year of college, this became burned in my brain with flashes of my new life and in this case, the start of my new life working in music. It felt so cool to be so plugged into what music in AZ was doing, and up until today I really didn't even have a grasp of just how much something like this meant and how people were doing this long before any of us threw our hat into the ring and tried to do something similar. I love that they worked in bands that weren't from AZ, perhaps nudging some of the AZ bands out of our desert bubble and into a national consciousness.

The lineup is seriously awesome, even if some of these names aren't as familiar six years later. I was able to order this and the A Modified Document record at Stinkweed's online, so do some digging or just check out each of the individual bands.

01 The Go Reflex (first ever release) - From Boxtop to Boxtop
02 Cursive - Great Decay
03 Seven Storey - Time to Go
04 The Real Diego - Safe Sound
05 Recover - Betting All I Have
06 Kristopher Astrom & Hidden Truck - All Lovers Hell (Confined)
07 Mock Orange - Song D'Lux
08 Bluetip -Newport
09 Fine China - Give Us Treble
10 The Format - The First Single
11 Grey Am - Phoenix on Fire (Re-Unionized)
12 Fivespeed - In the AM
13 The Good Life - Thin Walls Between Us
14 Fireside - Thing on a Spring
15 Before Braille - Not Tonight Not Ever
16 J.Rawls - Splendid
17 Bluebird - Some Days
18 The Revolution Smile - Gift
19 Chris Mills - Waitin on a Superman
20 Reubens Accomplice - Don't Forget the Promise

I absolutely love this song and happy it's on YouTube. I recall having it on repeat for several days once: