An interface to
cultural memory
Golden Era DnB grew out of a community. It is becoming a record of Drum & Bass: the music, the people, the objects, the places and the technology, held together by when they happened.
How it is built
Time is the interface
The archive is organised by year and month before it is organised by anything else, because that is how the music actually happened and how people remember it.
Precision is recorded, not assumed
A record known only to 1995 is stored as 1995. It never becomes 1 January 1995 to make a database tidier.
Gaps stay visible
An empty month says so and asks for help. Nothing is written to cover silence.
Sources travel with claims
Every entry can carry its sources and a verification state, from unverified through to primary source.
Rights before images
Sleeves, flyers and photographs are not published without clearance. The archive can show that it holds something without reproducing it.
The past is not the point
Respecting what was made is not the same as saying nothing since is any good. New music sits in the same system.
Current state
Part researched,
part still a lead.
24 of 37 entries carry a citation and have been checked against it. The other 13 are leads: they may well be right, but nobody has checked them, and they say so on their own record. Nothing is deleted for being unconfirmed, because a lead tells the next researcher where to look.
The first sourcing pass covered 1994 to 1998 and corrected three things this archive had wrong: a prize win dated to a month no source supports, a venue given a closing year that could not be confirmed, and a residency recorded as a date range when only its launch is documented. Years like 1992 and 1999 are empty because the research has not been done, not because nothing happened.
Open the timeline