An Album Lost Two Decades In Time

Hey, it’s Koosk. It’s been awhile since I’ve made a video. If you’re wondering what this channel is it’s a channel focusing on forgotten, lost, or underrated music. Not astrology or typology, I know. I found I made an Instagram under this email and will be memeing and sharing information on that account about those topics though. You can say that’s my accidental advertising angle with this channel. A few instances and NateTheMate videos made me interested in this topic. A purchase from a small record store I made in 2018 started this interest of mine and if NateTheMate can cover Pop Punk and related genre’s bands nuances in depth, maybe I can expand on that idea and shine light on smaller or forgotten acts. It would be a more general take on the genre of videos with a wavywebsurf twist, why not try it? On top of that when lost media videos were popular, I did eat those up. If I can talk about lost media in particular is unlikely but I’d have to say that is another influence. My old content is still being created on a different medium and you can always message me for conversations on those topics. Sometimes my brain isn’t fully there but I will try to offer insight off the bat. Here we’re going to look at some music and maybe learn about what lies beneath the art itself.

Do you remember times in your life where you found something that was lost in time? One I remember clearly due to it being last year was talking about an acoustic artist with someone on Discord. Hutton Baird aka Buttons, was an active acoustic artist earlier this decade. He garnered attention from Vans Warped Tour and I could make a whole video on him. Around 2016 however, Baird seemingly disappeared from the music scene entirely. Fast forward to 2019, Discord is popular and there are dedicated servers for various communities, including ones for music fans. Some have bots that can access last.fm. Another user who I talked to in the server and I discussed Buttons and where he is now. Spoiler alert, he is a drummer for a Post Hardcore band called Amaya Lights now. They have music on Bandcamp if you want to check them out. We tried to pull up artist information of this band from the FMcord bot, sometimes bots make mistakes and the bot pulled up a different artist than the band Amaya Lights. At the time of writing this the artist they pulled up has 20 listeners on last.fm, 8 followers on Spotify, and one album from the year 2000.

Amaya Andreas popped up instead. She has one album titled Organic released in the year 2000. It's an acoustic album that stayed true to it's time yet provokes emotion in the listener. When first hearing it I could listen to it straight through with zero issues. When you listen you can tell she put emotion and work behind her music. Organic is an 8 track album. Physical copies were produced and still today, you can hear it on Spotify and Youtube. Looking up Andreas online is difficult in the present age. Going off of Amazon, the record label it's listed under just has an address and phone number on a business finder site. No other artists or bands pop up when looking for Sanitary Feminine Records which we'll get more into later. The record label situation is confusing within itself. Spotify says this album is an independent release, Spotify and the actual physical copies says it's under Sanitary Feminine, and All Music lists it as an Orchard Enterprises release. Which one is it?

Technically, all of the above record labels are correct to the material. Sanitary Feminine seems to be Andreas' own label. Both Andreas and the label (according to the business site) is based in New Jersey. On top of that her old website around 2003, amayaandreas.com, seemed to be converted into a site focused on this label. Sporting the logo and had hidden options you could click on. Today I couldn't discover the site due to that feature being provided by flash and the WayBackMachine didn't agree with that. Where does Orchard fit in? According to the website in 2001, Andreas' music was featured in ads promoting the TV channel Oxygen and two MTV shows. Real World Extreme Challenges and Road Rules to be exact. During that time frame Orchard also helped distribute independent releases. Fun fact, they worked on film and television scores a few years after Organic's release when they were bought out in 2003 by Dimensional Associates. Speaking of that the people who worked on Organic excluding Andreas were Adam Deitch, Brian Bell, Kermit Driscoll, Frank Hauch, and David Schwartz. If you weren't older than 13 in the 2000s or obsessed over the 2000s when you were 13, Schwartz wrote the score to Arrested Development. That's a joke, I didn't know the guy's name until I was doing research on this album. It's safe to assume Orchard distributed Sanitary Feminine within it's time and made connections to the label.

Back to Amazon, a review from Sadie in 2003 says "From what I hear she [Andreas] is working on a new CD I am sure it will be good if not better!" If you're wondering it seems like Sadie wasn't necessarily right or wrong with this claim. Everywhere on the internet only has Organic listed as the only release for Amaya Andreas. Last.fm which was quite popular two years after the supposed release, yet only had Organic listed. She probably only had released one album unless if there is lost media I can't see on her website due to flash disappearing into obscurity and bad Elsa pregnancy games. With said comment Orchard being bought out by Dimensional may have shifted this focus elsewhere in the company. They started to buy independent record labels after the purchase after all. Sanitary Feminine Records may have lost their distributor around this time. Looking at the website, they had stocking problems at first so a need for extra people working on this would be useful. Back then Bandcamp was not a thing and being DIY just got slightly easier with computers being more accessible than ever. Andreas' website had purchase links on it and the album was always available on Amazon. Yesterday was not like today though, the early 2000s still lacked all the resources bands today have when it comes to advertisement, printing, and pressing. Amazon also wasn't an over billion dollar company at this time either but a place to mainly buy books and I'm guessing music. A need for a distributor or a larger company to help print copies may be a valid assumption to have. Orchard could have also taken the rights to her music making her go under a different name in the future. Other than that a lack of funds to produce the album may have happened. Crowdfunding wasn't commonplace at the time either. Life could have thrown a curve ball making it difficult to produce LP2 due to other priorities. She may have also just lost interest. Of course, this is just what could have happened. No clear answer is on the internet.

You, the audience, may be asking why I haven't contacted the number on the business profile. I mainly haven't because the place may not be the home of Sanitary Feminine anymore. The last WayBackMachine capture of amayaandreas.com returns to a 404 page. Saying "Nick Robinson visited Japan, you can call a number" is probably useless. With that being said I don't think you should call that number since someone on the other line may have no information and bugging them isn't worth the time. Speaking of that, I couldn't really see the screenshots of the site around 2008-2015 well. A page with a few MP3s and a graphic of an audio player was on it for two seconds before fading to white. If there is more than Organic or more bands on Sanitary Feminine, I can't tell. Maybe someone else can uncover that mystery one day. All I can say is Sadie from Amazon saw her as an amazing live artist and Rachel from Amazon really dislikes bubblegum pop. In all seriousness, Amaya Andreas released a heartfelt acoustic album in her college years. According to her website she toured at least the North Eastern half of the United States and got her music on TV. That within itself is impressive.

On an ending note thanks for watching and if you know of any lost media or more information connecting to Amaya Andreas' music or Sanitary Feminine as a label, it would be cool to talk about this further. There may be more hiding under the flash site that could be lost.