Master Tape Rescue’s mission is to reconnect musicians, producers, and labels to their lost and forgotten recordings, unlocking this music for a new generation of listeners.

The concept is a listing service: studios send us an inventory of the materials they hold, and we publish that to our website. It’s that simple.

Master Tape Rescue doesn’t own the recordings nor will we sell them; we don’t get in the middle of negotiations, we just make the connections between the parties.

It may be hard to envision now, but from the 1960s through to the 1990s, every recording studio recorded to tape, which happens to be a stable medium for storage. After a recording session finished, it was common for a studio to be left with remnants of the session: outtakes, an unheard demo or, in some cases, entirely unreleased recordings.

In many cases, studios have held tapes in storage, preserving the recordings over the years. We have found dozens, hundreds, even thousands of tapes in closets or attics. Most studios aren’t even aware of what they’re holding, which means there could be treasures that are inaccessible to the musicians or labels that made them, let alone to fans, enthusiasts and scholars across the globe.

Very often, the studio is used to having the old tapes around; it becomes a comfortable and low-interest asset. Studio ownership may change hands many times over the years, but the stored tapes remain in limbo.

The problem is an information gap between the studio holding the tapes and those who wish to find them. The studio doesn’t want to throw them away, but the effort to search out ownership and return the tapes isn’t worthwhile. On the creative side, musicians and labels are often unaware that their tapes exist, or where to find them. That’s where Master Tape Rescue comes in: by listing tape inventories we make otherwise inaccessible recordings searchable for everyone.

The Master Tape Rescue concept is a database, a matchmaking service like Craigslist: studios collect details on the material they hold and Master Tape Rescue collates and publishes the list to our website. It’s that simple. Master Tape Rescue doesn’t own the recordings nor will we sell them; we don’t get in the middle of negotiations, we just make the connections between the parties and act simply as a repository of information.

While we already have thousands of tapes in our database, we have only scratched the surface of the recordings sitting on shelves around the world. So far, the database has found material from such bold-faced names as: The Who, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller Band, Bonnie Raitt, Jimi Hendrix, Barbra Streisand, Warren Zevon, Brian Wilson, Judy Garland, Neil Sadaka, among many, many others. Successful reconnections are happening all the time.

If you’re a studio holding tapes, please contact us. If you’re an artist looking for old sessions, please search our database for your material. Our ultimate goal is to make sure these previously lost recordings are shared with the world.

The database is always growing, so check back often and follow us on social media where we’ll be posting ongoing updates.

Master Tape Rescue was founded by Brian Kehew. Brian is a Los Angeles-based mixing engineer (Aretha Franklin, Fleetwood Mac, the Woodstock Festival Concert), co-author of the legendary Recording The Beatles book, and an expert on vintage recording studios and practices. His company Round And Wound is one of the West Coast’s most-successful tape-transfer companies for digitizing recorded media.

In 2024 Master Tape Rescue merged with Forgotten Futures, a nonprofit organization founded by Wally De Backer, aka Gotye. Forgotten Futures’ mission is to revive lost and forgotten yet vital artifacts of electronic musical instrument history by collecting, faithfully restoring and preserving original instruments; researching and presenting the stories of their inventors; and bringing to light the cultural impact both from the time in which they were made, and more importantly, how they can make an impression on our current and future cultural moments. Visit forgottenfuturesmusic.org to learn more about the mission and its other programs.

Photographs courtesy of Tag Christof.
Homepage photograph by Jason Whalen.

For further reading, please check out this article from the New York Times.