Thank-you Tristan

Very sad to learn about the recent passing of our friend and fellow junglist Tristan Iofolla. Tristan reached out to us in the fall of 2019 about a collection of tapes that he had rescued from ending up in the dump. His friend and fellow junglist was doing a purge and Tristan, who had been on jungletapes.com and seen the Call for Tapes recognized the significance and importance of the collection and his friend gave the tapes to him. Tristan then reached out to us about getting the tapes digitized and Chris and I went up to see him at his place in Toronto to meet with him and see the tapes ourselves. We bonded pretty quickly. Tristan was a friendly guy who wore his heart on his sleeve. He was outgoing, funny and intelligent, and trusting as well too. We left with a snowboard boot box full of tapes. Even without going through all of them we knew we had something special. These weren't radio shows, these were rave/party tapes and studio tapes. There's a lot of those floating out there already on sites like the Mixtape Archive, but there was stuff in here that has never been digitized, some of them were so rare they actually had handwritten copy 10/ out of 12 type notes on them. Yes, that tape you lost and haven't heard for 20 something years is in here. Anyways, Chris and I set to work. Over the next 4 years we digitized them, mastered them, photographed them, and scanned the tape sleeves. We did it all, and organized them and made copies, one for each of ourselves and one for Tristan on a hard drive he provided to us. It took a long time too. There was a lot of tapes, and trying to manage working from home and helping our kids with school during the pandemic really cut into that tape time, but we wanted to do it right because one day we were doing to return those tapes to Tristan after the project was done, which it was in the fall of 2023. We reached out to Tristan and then we got together in January of this year to return the tapes and give him the hard drive. He was going to load up the tapes onto his MP3 player and listen to them on his drive down south into the desert.  He didn't make it back. Chris reached out in the spring and got a strange message back. We didn't know it at the time but it was actually written by a family member. Chris reached out again this week to see if Tristan was coming to the big party this weekend and got a message again from the same family member explaining this time that Tristan had passed away. This picture is Tristan excited to get his tapes back the last time we saw him. Miss you man! Anyways, it's probably a good time as any to let you know what the plan is, and had been all along. This year is the 10 year anniversary of jungletapes.com and we're going to celebrate the anniversary with the biggest drop we've ever done and post all of Tristan's tapes so his memory can live on. He wanted you to hear these tapes too and we're going to make sure that happens. It's a lot of work to get the site prepped but stay tuned, we're working hard behind the scene to get the big drop ready. Peace out and if you are going to the big party in Toronto this weekend, make sure to say hi to Chris I heard he's got some jungletapes stickers for y'all yo.