I figured as my first post here on Bargain Bin Basement I'd explore a more personal and anecdotal piece of lost media that I myself am responsible for uncovering: The topic of today's post is twin folk duo Ghost Bees (also known under their new project's name Tasseomancy, not to be confused with the Ghost Bees album of the same name), and a brief overview of their history, as well as their lost (and found) content.
(PLEASE READ MY UPDATE POST AFTER THIS, AS IT HAS MORE UP-TO-DATE INFO REGARDING THESE LOST SONGS)
In my freshman year of high school, I was in the market for new music to listen to. Spotify was and still is my streaming platform of choice, so I made it a goal to pay attention to the music it was suggesting me. After a while I was recommended a song on an album called Tasseomancy by Ghost Bees. I did not really think much of their music other than the fact I liked and streamed it because it seemed too niche to have that much more information. That was until they disappeared from all streaming platforms a year later. I didn't notice at first, but I eventually started to wonder why songs like 'Vampires Of The West Coast' and 'Tear Tassel Ogre Heart' wouldn't come on shuffle anymore!
See, Ghost Bees was made up of a twin duo: Sari and Romy Lightman, who originally created the project around 2005/2006 and would go on to write/release a single album in 2009 under the name. It honored their great-great grandmother Clara Chernos, who appears on a cake in the album cover while also touching on other folklore they were deeply connected to. Chernos was very intertwined in the art of Tasseomancy, or tea leaf reading due to it being one of her only forms of income and passed it down to the entirety of the Lightman's family. This explains the frequent use of the word in their music ventures.
Ghost bees itself did not last very long, though, and in 2010 the duo decided to switch from the name Ghost Bees to Tasseomancy (in honor of the album), and in early 2011 they released their first album under this new name: Ulalume. While the same people were responsible for both projects there was a distinct change in the content they were making, separating the two from each other distinctly. One of the major pushes for this was that they were simply tired of what they were doing and wanted to try a different approach.
Ghost Bees' Tasseomancy album was up on streaming platforms for many years following the dissolution of the moniker, until one day in 2019 when it was mass deleted from everywhere on the internet. Many months after this loss there was a single song uploaded by Youtube user Juniperro in 2020 and then followed by the rest of the album Tasseomancy in 2021. These MP3s were likely ripped from the CD release of the album or taken from a music site like Soulseek because they were effectively lost on the surface web for close to a year before being uploaded to Youtube. As a huge fan of this band, I was upset to find the album gone, and am forever thankful for Juniper's upload. On the topic of this user, Juniper was one of the only active people with any semblance of interest in this group and I felt compelled to message them regarding this when I purchased my Demo 2007 CD.
This is my Demo 2007 CD.
One of the major things that becomes increasingly clear as you look into or research any band that was just starting to make music with the beginnings of the internet is that you often overlook things, or rather, things just aren't saved and if you weren't there to see them when they happened, it's like they never existed at all. This is what I found myself thinking as I went onto Discogs in December of 2021 and saw a new release for sale under the Ghost Bees name.
"A self-titled album? really?" I said to myself in disbelief as I went to open the Wayback Machine to see if there were any crawls on their now defunct myspace from the time this album would've come out.
There was one copy for sale by the person who uploaded the entry to Discogs. It was 6$ USD with 5$ USD shipping. One of the major reasons I immediately bought this was that the track list listed two songs that I'd never heard of before. Especially because there really is not much to memorize with a single album group. After the purchase I waited patiently for it to come in and tried to do additional research. I was dumbfounded at this because none of the information COULD HAVE lined up even if it wanted to due to the date and the proclamation of it being its own album. That's a huge thing to proclaim!
In the interim I messaged Juniper, the person who uploaded Tasseomancy to Youtube, to ask if they had any insight into the existence of this supposed self-titled album that was not once mentioned anywhere, not even in interviews for the release of their 2008 album. It didn't make sense. While they had never heard of this release at all, they did tell me they received an e-mail from another fan of the band at some point with a mysterious MP3 attached that was labeled "Isabelle". I had not received my CD at this point so as far as I knew there was a third found lost Ghost Bees track, and I'd even uploaded it to Youtube with the track name "Isabelle". Once I got my CD in the mail though I ran to my CD player and skipped to the songs I'd never heard before. When it played 'For Flannery O'Conner', I came to a sudden realization: everyone who had been distributing this song, Isabelle, had actually been passing around a mislabeled song. This song was NOT called "Isabelle" at all, and frankly I'm unsure if that song exists at all anymore. Going along with this, while the rest of the songs are ones I'd heard before that were released on Tasseomancy, every single one of them except "Haunting Intervals" was a demo version of its respective track. Most of the "demo" songs lack strings or other specific music details that would later complete them on their full release.
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Another thing that the original Discogs uploader got wrong was the date and the name of the album. This album was actually called "Demo 2007", released in 2006. You'd think with this new information I would be able to locate this release and figure out where it came from! Well, it's not that easy. Knowing the name and release date was only half the battle. It isn't even listed here, on Youth Club Record's own release page. There is still no information about it surfacing anywhere and that is unfortunately where I have left off the search for now. I emailed Sari and Romy on April 23rd this year, 2022, with no response yet. I even emailed the original emailer of the 'Isabelle' MP3 with no luck! I really do doubt I'll get responses from either. Juniper said something during our conversation that made me realize how truly lost everything is: "there was that huge online purge of Ghost Bees stuff right after the Tasseomancy album got wiped." Yikes. it's true. A lot of content was wiped, when it came to streaming and even their myspace that shut down in 09/10. We have to essentially grasp straws for the lost stuff until we find someone who knows more than we do.
Now, this begs the question, where am I now? How much is still out there? How can you help?
That's truly the elephant in the room, isn't it? after all, I am making an entire blog post about this band and its lost and found content. I cannot be sure at a 100% accuracy that everything I list after this will be salvageable, but I will try to only include things I am fairly certain 1. existed, 2. are find-able.
First off, we have the list I've concocted of songs that they may or may not have released at some point on Myspace. They closed their myspace so early that there is no way to access their music on the Wayback machine to see titles.
I am confident that these exist out there in MP3 format or similar because Happy Now and For Flannery O'Conner were not the only random lost songs. Here's "Did the Red Sea Part?". I still have no idea where this song came from, but it has the Ghost Bees sound more than the Tasseomancy sound and is labeled as a Ghost Bees song most of the time when uploaded. This gives me the hope of finding these supposed songs.
Can you help? well, why not! Just be nice and don't harass the twins. We will never know how much is truly lost until all of it is truly found, and that is the best and the worst part of searching for lost media. I love Ghost Bees and Tasseomancy.
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If you'd like to learn more about Ghost Bees, you can check out these posts below!
(#6 is special because they play some songs that would later be released under their new name in their old style!)
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If you have any leads, PLEASE contact me through my Email at Grzybowt@gmail.com, or check my "contact me" page for more info.
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