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.
Share this post