Chapter Music Launches Chapter Epilogue Sublabel to Digitise Forgotten Australian Music

Guy Blackman, who began writing the first chapter of his independent record label as a 17-year-old in Perth/Boorloo in 1992, has launched Chapter Epilogue, a sublabel dedicated to digitising and reissuing Australian music absent from streaming platforms. Blackman and his partner Ben O'Connor have released more than 200 records on Chapter Music since he relocated to Melbourne/Naarm in the early 1990s; last year they announced the label would stop signing new artists, and the archival imprint became Blackman's new "baby." The first release features five artists, among them Perth band Wash, whose early-'90s shoegaze demo tape was remastered as the imprint's inaugural title. Blackman describes the project as a response to "cultural amnesia" and the misconception that all music exists digitally. The digitising process is physical and precarious: reel-to-reel tapes are baked at low temperature for hours to recover sound, some deteriorate during transfer, and vinyl-only sources require removing static, crackle and scratches — surface noise Blackman calls "kind of romantic" and not to be over-cleaned. He frames the effort as an incomplete project aimed at showing listeners more of the richness of Australian music.