Transcript because these images are not very high resolution and can be hard to read
Page 1: (cover page) A Strange CD by Noel Ashley.
Page 2: In the summer of 2023, I went to a thrift store. I was looking at the CDs section and didn't find anything interesting, but my sister did. She found a wallet that had a lot of burned CDs. It was a lot of 2000's alternative music that I had been wanting to check out. There was Slipknot, The Mars Volta, Brand New, and lots of other bands. She bought me the wallet and got it for 2 dollars. When I got home and really looked at them, what interested me the most was not any of the alternative music, it was a CD that was just labeled "Ether Demo."
Page 3: I wasn't sure what it was. Obviously it was a demo CD, but I had no idea if "Ether" was the band, the album, or one of the songs. I put it in my CD drive to see if the files had names. They did. The files said it was by a band called "SWV." I looked them up and they sounded very different than the CD. I realized that the files were recorded over a CD single. I have no idea how this happened, because you can't change burned CDs after you make them. Maybe it was different in the early 2000's. I'm assuming it was a glitch.
Page 4: I had decided I was going to try to find this band. I looked up the lyrics in the songs and found nothing. I uploaded the CD to YouTube and posted the link to various social media groups. I first tried the groups centered around the city the thrift store was in, and then I went to r/lostwave, which is a subreddit dedicated to finding lost songs.
Page 5: I got a lot of responses. Some people really liked the songs. Someone even claimed to have known the band. Based on what I know now, they probably did, but they never got back to me when I asked if they knew if the band made anything else. I even suspected that chillwave musician Toro Y Moi was involved somehow, because there was a burned CD advertising his old bands' myspace. He probably wasn't though, because he said in an interview that he used to make hundreds of those CDs and give them out.
Page 6: After a few weeks, someone asked me for the song lengths. I thought it was a weird question, but I provided them. They ended up finding the bands' MySpace. There's a lot that I hate about Reddit, but every once in a while someone is actually nice. I don't care to search for any more information, because I now know the track names, the first names of the band members, and the name of the band that made these songs.
Page 7: Unfortunately, they were one of the bands that had their music deleted by MySpace. I looked to see if anyone had archived the songs on LostMySpace, but no one did. The studio versions of these songs are lost to time. I am still very glad that I and the rest of the internet get to listen to the demos. Whoever the CD wallet person is, they've introduced me to some great music. I could make a whole other mini zine about that.
Page 8: (back cover) Ether Demo, Artist: Ether, Recorded: Around 2003, Tracklist, 1. Money Where Your Mouth Is. 2. Glycerin. 3. Today Is Thursday. Here is a link to the YouTube upload of the songs.