In the last few years, filk has lost two major recording engineers, Chris “Keris” Croughton and Harold M. Stein. Like many filkers, Harold was a great collector of tapes and CDs, but his collection went beyond that, into raw board feeds from filk concerts and the steadfast recording of housefilks and filk circles at conventions. Harold would tirelessly run around with his dozen Zoom recorders, capturing every detail, sometimes in quadruplicate. He also acquired the recording collections of many filk stalwarts, including Wail Songs founder Bob Laurent.
Harold also collected songbooks at a prodigious rate. Not just professionally produced songbooks from Wail Songs and Off Centaur, but also peoples’ personal collections, which he duly scanned in. And we still have all those files, many of them unprocessed, but we now have a way to continue his work.
To mark what would have been his 50th birthday, his friends have launched an archive that you can visit at http://filk.meravhoffman.com (full FAQ and contact form available) and a clip and song book identification service here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/wingkitty/filk-archive.
If you’ve attended lots of filk cons, or regional filk circles, please help us identify audio clips of voices and songs. If you haven’t, please help us out on identifying songbooks. All your work helps us extend Harold’s dream.
Thank you!
@meravhoffman
Director, Harold M. Stein Memorial Filk Archive