Calgary Cassette Preservation Society

03/03/2026

Excellent mail day. Received this disc from the legend himself, Tona Ohama. Looking forward to spinning this….

02/17/2026

Cleared out some of the backlog of tapes in preparation for a much-needed renovation at CCPS HQ. The tape are off the shelves and in storage… but on the plus side, we keep finding weird things we’ve picked up over the years.

02/06/2026

XV Olympic Winter Games Organizing Committee - Come Together in Calgary (1988)

With the 2026 Winter Olympics about to kick off, there's been a lot of nostalgia for Calgary's 88 Olympics... so we dug out this tape, which we pulled from the shelves at Hot Wax many years ago and somehow forgot to bring over to the new site.

What? Who? Why? These are all questions we have. In general, but also specifically about this tape. We haven't been able to figure out who the authors/artists behind this is - all we know is that this tune was dubbed the official theme of the 1988 Winter Olympics. Says the Canadian Encyclopedia:

The official theme song 'Come Together in Calgary,' first recorded in 1981, was re-recorded in 1988 and incorporated into the film score of Calgary 88: Soon the Glory Begins. The LP Dream on the Horizon: A Tribute to the Olympic Spirit featured Rik Emmet of Triumph, Liona Boyd, and Alex Lifeson of Rush, and was produced by Keith Elshaw (Chartwell WSC-331).

That doesn't really help us. Are these three versions the re-recorded versions or the 1981 versions? We could probably take the time to find out, but that's not our usual way of working, as you know.

Ah, well - relive the glory of the 88 Olympics with this tape.



https://calgarycassettes.org/recording_detail/come-together-in-calgary-xv-olympic-winter-games-organizing-committee-1

01/29/2026

Ah, nostalgia. Somehow it’s been ten years (!!) since and the CCPS unveiled the Calgary Songs Project, a celebration the 30th anniversary of the through a list of 30 of the “best” Calgary songs from 1986 to 2016. In the ten years since then, I’ve often thought about the list of songs we came up with and wondered, “did we get it right?” Well, obviously NO, but we got it close.
What would I have done differently? A lot of it is fiddling at the edges – there are a pile of songs in there that are solid choices an 100% hold up. But as much space as 30 songs gave us, once we filled the list to 20 the last decisions got more challenging.

I think we picked the wrong Huevos Rancheros song – “Crowchild Trail” is good (and has a regional reference), but there are better choices like “Rocket to Nowhere.” There’s also a bit of nitpicking we could do with Tim Williams’ “It’s Enough To Be Remembered” and Beyond Possession’s “Skater’s Life” – technically, both were first recorded outside the dates we were looking at.

There are a couple of bands I would love to have seen on the list – most notably Red Autumn Fall (“Blazer Boys” is a banger), Napalmpom (the opening riff of “Guided By Volume” still slays me every time) and Lab Coast (so many great tunes to chose from). But there was no way to squeeze them in without dropping someone.

We’re also buoyed up by the fact that a bunch of the artists we selected were also included on the list of top 25 albums of the first 25 years of the millennium that the published last year – gems like Reverie Sound R***e, Women, and Hot Little Rocket.

High Performance Rodeo is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year (happy anniversary to them!!!) – if I’d had more foresight I could have prepared a 40 songs list to celebrate… but sometimes making lists is just another path to regret. I’ll let our original list from 10 years ago stand as is.

Scroll thru for the list of songs… You can follow the original saga – including the recommendations from folks out in the community and Kenna Burima’s amazing carillon compositions – at https://calgarycassettes.org/calgarysongsproject.

Arif Ansari, CCPS

01/27/2026

For over 35 years, the Ship has been a huge part of Calgary's music community. SAVE THE SHIP!

Dear Ship Community,

As you may know, there is currently a development application underway at City Hall which presents a very serious threat to the future of the Ship & Anchor. We’re writing to you today to ask for your help in keeping that threat at bay.

This development application was submitted by the Strategic Group, the company that now owns the building that the Ship & Anchor has operated out of for 35 years. They are seeking permission to build 125 apartments at 532 and 534 17th Ave, including 5 stories of apartments directly on top of our pub. In our view, there is no way to do this without seriously compromising the operations of the Ship & Anchor, and the Ship’'s patio, in particular.

It’s a familiar tale: developers construct buildings and market apartments using live music venues and bars nearby as enticements for young professionals, but do not design appropriately to mitigate the level of sound. Then after a few months of normal operations, the nearby businesses start getting noise complaints, every single night, over and over again, until they are forced to shut down. This is a particular concern with Strategic Group’s application: in their configuration, our beloved live music and patio sounds will be happening directly below the first level of apartments, which is guaranteed to cause complaints. The same sounds that we have been making for thirty-five years will become a threat to our continued operation. We’re good neighbours and our sound is manageable, but no bar, particularly with live music, can expect to share a building with apartments and not eventually be shutdown.

The solution is simple - don't put apartments in the same building as the Ship! Strategic Group can build their apartments separately; behind and beside the pub, but not on top of it.

35 years ago, we opened a bar that took on the characteristics of the people who hung out there, that reflected their cares and personalities, and become home to a community. Like any community, we tried to take care of our own. When the Lorraine Apartments burned down many years ago, the Ship community raised $10,000 for displaced tenants, many of whom were Ship customers. This was followed by numerous collective efforts to raise funds for charitable causes, including the Fort Mac fire, food bank benefits, our cancer fundraisers, and the annual Ship-Nog Campaign, which raises money for a rotating cast of local charities, and has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years (including $70,000 in the last 6 weeks alone!).

For so many years we have relied on our community to help us help others. Now, we are humbly asking for your help to protect the community that we have built together. The best way to do this is by letting City Hall know what you think about this development - community input drives good planning decisions, and the City Planning department needs that input to help them make the right decision on this development.
We believe that urban density is important and a critical step towards more affordable housing.

But density cannot come at the expense of the very thing that will support it: a living, breathing, and sometimes noisy inner city culture. Music is sometimes loud and it needs to be. Crowds of people enjoying themselves are loud and sometimes they need to be. Let's have development that is designed to accommodate that, not chase it away.

People can also be loud when they recognize a threat to something they think is important. That is how we feel right now, and if that sounds like you too, if live music and a vibrant inner city culture are important to you, then please get loud and communicate that using the links below.

We have spoken to people at City Hall. There is support for our position, but they make it very clear that a convincing development position will always be more powerful if it is backed by the community. The timing on this is uncertain at this point but we have been told that the sooner comments come in, the better.

!

To comment on the development, please visit: : https://dmap.calgary.ca/?p=DP2025-06592

01/25/2026

Jack Whyte - A Night With Robert Burns (1977)

Happy Robbie Burns Day! Considering we're a city that was named/re-named for a town in Scotland, it's probably not surprising that the day celebrating Scotland's great poet is a big deal here. To celebrate, we're digging out this LP from local actor (and later author) Jack Whyte who, in 1975, premiered a one-man show he had written around Burns' work. Whyte's original play was two hours long (which the Herald's review noted was... well, long) - this recording trims things down to 45 minutes of brief spoken word pieces and Burns' folk songs. Being based on poems and lyrics that are over 200 years old and this is delivered with an authentic Scottish accent, it does get a little hard to follow at times. But if you're looking to get in the mood before heading down to the Ship and Anchor for the Toast to the Haggis this evening, this is probably a good place to get your earbones tuned and ready for that Scottish brogue.

https://calgarycassettes.org/recording_detail/a-night-with-robert-burns-jack-whyte

01/24/2026

Raghav - Let's Work It Out 12" (2004)

We're closing a very significant gap in the CCPS collection with this 12" single. Calgary has produced a few big music stars - but Raghav Mathur () may be one of the biggest. Sure, he was born in Toronto and moved to California when he was 17, but the global superstar has credited his upbringing in Calgary with getting him to where he is today:

“It’s such a unique musical spot, especially when I was growing up and going to junior high and high school and starting to formulate my songwriting chops. Here I was so heavily influenced by Indian music, both classical and in film, and R&B and hip-hop at a time where I was probably in the one place in North America where it was the hardest to hear any three of those three genres. So I listened to a lot of country. I think that helped form what was going to be my songwriting... I think it gave me an edge in terms of writing pop R&B songs, especially at the beginning because it was a little bit different and it did tell a story.”

That Herald article also notes that he spent time with the Youth Singers of Calgary, studied music at Sir Winston Churchill High School, and worked with vocal coach Seth Riggs in California (we know Riggs isn't Calgarian, but he sang on a Stampede record...), so we're inclined to call that a strong Calgary connection. Oh, and the late Neil MacGonigill was one of his mentors.

One of the things on our to-do list is go searching for a copy of his first album on cassette in the upper NE of the city... and maybe eat a pile of samosas and jalebi while we're at it. Until then, we'll sit back and enjoy this 12" featuring remixes of the second single from that LP. We hear the influences of Indian film music and R&B on this... maybe not so much the country, though.

https://calgarycassettes.org/recording_detail/lets-work-it-out-12-raghav

01/06/2026

When I did my 2025 recap last week, I left out one big thing… thanks to Kimberly Getz for nudging me on this one.

Last January, Kimberly and her brother Aaron reached out to me about taking on a collection of cassettes, DAT tapes, and archival CDs that were part of the legacy of Dave Alcock and his time at Sundae Sound (and prior). I want to thank Kimberly for entrusting me with this – it’s kind of overwhelming, which is probably why I’ve been sitting on it.

So what’s in these boxes? There are VHS tapes (I’m pretty sure they’re ADATs), cassette tapes (including 4-tracks), DAT tapes, all largely (but not exclusively) of Dave’s own bands from Elmo’s Dream to Falconhawk. And then there are two boxes of CDr/DVDrs with Cubase sessions and mixes of some of the many, many bands Dave recorded at Sundae Sound – some of which we know were released, others… I’m not so sure.

I’ve finally cracked into some of this, starting with the cassettes and DATs (thank you, Kimberly, for also passing me Dave’s DAT machine). I’m not sure how much of this will get put up on the CCPS site as a full digital download – but I’m starting with three tapes from Elmo’s Dream, the band Dave was in when I first met him over 30 years ago. There’s no date on these tapes – and there’s a lot of overlap. BUT two of them include the track “Astrogirl,” which stands as one of our favourite tracks from that era. If you miss the characteristic snap of Dave’s snare drum, you’ll want to give them a listen.

One of the projects for this year is sorting through the rest of this and deciding the best way to archive and present Dave’s collection. It’s different than a lot of the other material in the CCPS archive – but it’s an important and treasured addition.

Cheers, Dave. You’re loved and missed.

https://calgarycassettes.org/artist_detail/elmos-dream

01/02/2026

What happened??? How is it 2026 already? We swear it was just 1995… We’re making quick notes of what happened at the CCPS in the past year, here are our top five (in no particular order):

- Added over 500 recordings to the site. The most popular download of that batch is Wanda the Little Wizard by and Garry Jones!

- To mark our National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we added a collection of recordings from Indigenous musicians that includes current favourites like and , as well as LPs and tapes from the 1970s of pow wow music and drum groups from southern Alberta.

- Thanks to , we got to be part of a couple of listening parties for the long-lost bootleg of Nirvana’s one and only Calgary show, recorded at the Westward Club in 1991 by Jay Pay.

- Created a completely ridiculous interactive map of Calgary record stores, dating back to 1970. Why? Why not!

- Added a collection of recordings from Calgary and southern Alberta schools. Over the holidays we discovered an LP we missed, so keep your eyes peeled for more additions!

Whew! What’s coming in the next year? Well, for starters we’re going to be catching up on a backlog of CDs thanks to Cameron Young, who has been busy scanning and ripping stacks of discs for us.

Oh, and we’ll be celebrating a small milestone – it’s our 20th birthday this June! We should probably have a party or something…

Thanks to everyone who has whispered words of encouragement and passed us tapes and stuff over the past year! Happy 2026!!

- Arif Ansari, CCPS

12/10/2025

We really shouldn’t be allowed on eBay.