An Empty Van, a Box of Tapes, and the Summer of 1995

For 30 years, this music has been silent. Now, the first visual fragments from the Sun-Bleached Tapes have been recovered.

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.