The Vault (link now dead) was a forum started during the glory days of Toronto's rave scene by Chris Smart, and was "an amazing resource of flyers, MP3s and general flashbackery" according to James Applegath, co-creatorof Toronto's rave newsletter-turned-archive The Communic8r. Recently, The Vault has been taken down due to unpaid hosting fees, and will be totally erased from its servers on November 1. In response Applegath has started a crowdfunding campaign with GoFundMeto raise the $500 needed to restore The Vaultand move it to The Communic8r.
But is it worth themoney? A quick Google search reveals a list of similar websites (though many of the links are dead). I wondered if The Vault offers anything other sites don't, so I asked Applegath to justify for an outsider why the forumdeserves to be saved. Given howToronto dance culture was once recognized around the world, it's not surprising that The Vault's collection has been visited by at least one very important figure in jungle:
"Although it predates our website presence, The Vault picks up where we leave off in terms documentation of the Golden age. Lots of flyers and audio from '92-'95 (and beyond) that you can't find anywhere else. When I want to find specifics about a flyer or event in that time frame, I go there. And many old schoolers do - in fact,Goldie recently lifted a recording of him[self] on the Radio from '92 from the vault and promoted it on his own site.
Chris was ahead of his time in terms of nostalgia, that's for sure. It was pre-web 2.0 era, so the forum format became a little dated and fell out of popularity - but it's still an important relic."
(If you don't know who Goldie is, listen toTimeless right now.)
The donation page ishere. Below you can watch Digital Dance Nation, a recently recovereddocumentary onthe culture and its key players.
Save the Toronto rave forum The Vault with this crowdfunding campaign by Jordan Darville | Chart Attack.
