Systems of Romance

Here’s another rare cassette. This one goes out to Michael of Return to the East who originally posted the 12” from this excellent experimentally driven post-punk band. I believe they were from the NYC area, or at least one member is located there as of now. I’ve heard tales of the singer showing up to local bars and passing out copies of The Stark Elusive on vinyl, an otherwise essential piece of forgotten lore. Just check out the track “Blink” if you haven’t heard it before. Always reminded me of a gloomier reading of “Ceremony,” while the rest of the record does well to destroy melody with traces of noise and anguish.

Well, that particular 12” appears here as well as the first six tracks on this tape. Since it sounds like the album was just dubbed to the cassette here, it’s not of much interest but worth a comparison if you’re an audiophile. The real meat and potatoes of this tape comes from the final five tracks, which were recorded in 1992. The band faded into obscurity and these tracks never saw the light of day outside of this cassette. They sound like a natural and noisier progression from the 12”. In other words, well worth listening to!

Beg For Eden- Beg For Eden K7
1. Hands Flail
2. Blink
3. Your Corpse
4. Peripheral
5. Imminent Artillery
6. Entrails
7. Intro*
8. Jesus Jet Plane
9. Catatonic
10. This Now
11. Find Our Hearts Again

*download removed by request*

Peter Messina contacted me and respectfully asked for the download link to be removed due to the lesser quality of the dub. However, he’s offered some more info about the band and the stories behind these tracks:

You correctly point to the final five songs as being the really interesting part of that tape, and those are demos the band did in it’s practice space of the songs we did eventually record in the studio. With the idea being to put out a second EP or called Find Our Hearts Again.

The Great Greg Scott passed away in 2003. Jacques Cohen runs a very highly regarded studio called The Space in Poughkeepsie and John Dale, I believe might be in Austin, Tx or Oklahoma, I’m not sure.

He also said that he is in the process of exhuming many BFE studio and live tracks and will likely make them available in some form or another. More on that soon. Thanks for your understanding on this one!

This entry was posted on March 26, 2012 at 12:59 am and is filed under 1980s, 1992, beg for eden, cassette, goth, post-punk . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.