On Sunday a rare R.E.M. 1981 demo tape was discovered over at The Power of Independent Trucking, a rock-music blog. This comes just two weeks after the 30-year-old band broke up.
The album, called the Cassette Set, contains six tracks consisting of two versions of the songs “Sitting Still,” “White Tornado,” and the band’s debut single “Radio Free Europe.”
The album is available for a free download in the lossless FLAC format and contains versions of these songs that have been described as “fantastically rare.”
In the vein of punk rock’s do-it-yourself ethos, R.E.M. assembled the cassette’s packaging by hand using photocopied inserts and handwritten labels. This find comes courtesy of a “generous reader” and was limited to 400 copies, according to Billboard.com.
A career-spanning retrospective titled Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982 – 2011 is set to drop on Nov. 15. The two-disc, 40-track album will feature many of the band’s chart-topping singles including “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” “Everybody Hurts,” and “Shiny Happy People.”
