The CDs were seen as an adjunct to the vinyl version, and, like a lot of bands, we used to pile on any available extra tracks in a more or less archival spirit without much (or any) thought given to aesthetic cohesion. The idea was, why would anyone want to pay more money for a CD of this when you could get a perfectly good LP -- better give 'em something extra to justify the extra expense. (Though in some cases it's not at all clear that these extra tracks added value rather than subtracted it.)

Anyhow, the result was, in the end, a mess, and a blurring of the line between the albums per se and the morass of extras. (e.g., the crazy track listing of the Our Bodies Our Selves CD, where the obvious ending song "Game Over" is succeeded by three cool but random extra tracks (one of them inexplicably moved from the main album to the end) with "Swallow Everything" shoehorned in between "More Than Toast" and "Not Guilty" -- because they were recorded in the same session? And then there's a hidden track at the end of a big space of silence after "God Bless America"... Clearly, the product of a madman, if not several madmen. Yet I know that many people think of this nutty CD as the actual "real" album. And maybe it should have been, in that some of the crammed-in songs are many people's favorites. But, it wasn't.)
So when, in the wake of Lookout's exit, we re-organized the digital back catalog, we decided to restore the original vinyl track listing and sequences of the albums, eps, and singles. While many of the CD extras had been b-sides that had been included on their respective singles in the re-organization, this left out a great many previously released songs (thirty-two, to be exact.) Some of these were quite "important" ones too, like "King Dork", "We Are the Future People of Tomorrow", "Unpack Your Adjectives," as well as a lot of fun covers and such. The plan was always to compile these into an Odds 'n' Sods / Relics type album, but what with one thing and another, that plan hasn't happened till now.

I've tried to arrange the tracks as albums that can be listened to as such, eight songs to a "side" in the traditional manner, rather than chronological archives. They are from various sources, (covers comps, out-takes, demos, one live on the radio song) spanning 1987 thru 1999. The criterion for inclusion when it comes to the out-takes and demos is simply whether they have already appeared (and subsequently disappeared from) somewhere. I have however left off the terrible sounding live cassette recordings that were on the Making Things with Light CD; they were just messing everything up like they always have. (They're easy to find if you must have them, and in fact, I can even sell you a CD if you want one of those: drop me a line at [email protected]) As for the demos and out-takes, maybe one day I'll find the machinery and the gumption to re-examine those tapes and see if there's anything else interesting on them, but that's for another time if it ever comes. For now, this is what there is. You can get the whole thing at once, or song by song as needed. Or not, as the case may be. Just putting it out there, as it were.
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Finally, big, heartfelt thanks go to our good friend Pete Mattern at Planet X Recording Studio for mastering the comp. You'll probably be surprised how good it sounds, especially considering the sources.

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By Frank Portman and Chris Thacker
The devastation that the digital music revolution brought to the music industry and its reciprocally sustaining culture and subcultures has been exhaustively discussed and analyzed. The results of it are plain for all who walk in its ruins: music has been devalued to almost nothing in the commercial market, almost everyone went out of business, and the role of struggling musician became even more of a struggle. 

Less discussed has been the effect of this devaluation of music from the perspective of fans and music lovers, which has been paradoxical. While there is easy, cheap access to an effectively unlimited aggregate of material, being swamped in undifferentiated “content” has not proven to be the paradise it was cracked up to be. And in a world where releasing a record typically involves little more than pressing “send”, and where consuming the music encoded therein involves little more than clicking “add”, or even just doing nothing at all and passively allowing yourself to be fed from a cloud, the resulting experience, for all its convenience, has become highly impersonal at best. 

What can be done to restore the immediacy and personal quality that made bands and their “content" so compelling in the first place?  No one has figured out how to do this very well.  Most of just press “send" and click “add” and hope for the best.  That’s just not good enough, and we decided to do something about it by--

• Curating the best possible music from amazing artists
• Focusing the best physical product to support the music
• Creating a shared experience for fans

A record label is nothing more than a curator of music. If people trust the curator's taste(s) they will buy the music. That's why it is critical to focus on working with amazing artists. When the idea of Sounds Rad was being kicked around, the first person to immediately buy into the idea of personalizing the experience of buying music was Dr. Frank of the Mr. T Experience. If Sounds Rad’s first principle is to curate the best possible music, then damn it, MTX has to be a part of it. And from there it became clear that to goal is to find as many existing MTX fans and create a community by knocking them on their ass with releases that they would love to hear; merch that they would love to wear; and a shared experience that makes that them feel if they are members of a secret MTX cult replete with ritual handshakes, code names, and songs about girls.

Everything that "we" (the royal we--Sounds Rad and MTX) are trying to do is based on quality: records, apparel, and the experience. Imagine this: You place an order on the Sounds Rad website. A few days later you come home to a custom designed box at your door. You run inside and carefully open the box to find a new signed limited MTX album, a t-shirt that you actually want to wear all of the time, and the knowledge that you got amazing value. That's what we want to do. Everything item sold is coming from the band to the fan: a shared experience.