Some stories you hunt for. This isn't one of them. This one found me.

In July of this year, 2025, while visiting family, I found myself in a dusty storage unit in Santa Barbara looking at an abandoned 1990 Mitsubishi Delica van. My cousin had been gifted the unit, thinking it just held old camping gear. But on the passenger seat, there was a shoebox filled with unlabeled TDK cassette tapes and a few VHS tapes.

This Substack, and the podcast it holds, is the beginning of an audio exhibit dedicated to these tapes. They are the last known artifacts of a musician known only as "Drift Harper," who spent a single, transformative summer in the forgotten coastal town of Port Meridian in 1995 before vanishing.

In this first episode, I tell the story of that discovery and play the very first sounds I heard from the tapes—the beginning of a story that's been waiting three decades to be told. Together, we're going to piece together a portrait of an artist from the only thing he left behind: his voice, his music, and the sounds of his world.

The exhibit is open. The tapes are waiting to be heard.

For years, I've been obsessed with the stories behind the music we never got to hear. The lost recordings, the forgotten regional scenes, the artists who burned bright for a moment and then vanished. I believe that sometimes the most honest music is found on a dusty cassette tape in a box, not in a pristine studio.

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It started with a storage unit auction and a dusty shoebox full of unlabeled cassettes. For the past few months, I’ve been working to piece together the story of a musician the locals called "Drift Harper," who spent the summer of 1995 in Port Meridian, CA recording an entire catalog's worth of beautiful, melancholic music before vanishing around Labor Day weekend of that year.

The audio tapes tell one story—a story of a young artist finding their voice, forging connections, and pushing against the quiet pressures of a small town's music scene. But there were other tapes in that box. A handful of VHS cassettes, unlabeled and degraded from years of heat and neglect.

The restoration has been a slow, painstaking process. Much of the music and footage is gone forever. But some moments survived—brief, sun-bleached fragments of that lost summer. Glimpses of the places he went, the people he knew, and the feeling of a world on the verge of a major change.

This is the first time I'm sharing any of the recovered video. It isn't a complete story, but rather a collection of feelings and questions captured on magnetic tape.

This is the world of The Sun-Bleached Tapes. I believe the answers to what happened to Drift Harper are hidden somewhere inside these frames.

Watch the teaser below and tell me what you see.