Manchester Digital Music Archive  has teamed up with Manchester Metropolitan University to develop an online audio heritage map that will tell the story of the rave scene in Manchester in the words of clubbers, DJs, promoters, venue staff, producers and more.

The Lapsed Clubber Audio Map is a place for members of Greater Manchester’s original rave community to preserve and share their spoken word memories of clubbing and its culture during the ‘first decade’ of rave, 1985-1995.

Our interface allows you to record your voice directly into your desktop computer or laptop and pin 60-second sound clips onto a map of Greater Manchester at the exact spots where the events you are recalling originally happened.

You can also listen back to the memories of others.

Popular culture has referenced rave culture in Greater Manchester in print, in major films, on TV and in theatre, but almost always from the perspective of the well-known ‘expert insider’. Focusing on the raving landscape between 1985 and 1995, we are creating the Lapsed Clubber Audio Map with community input, giving the community the opportunity to write its own rave history.

Can you help?

If you went raving in Manchester between 1985 and 1995, we’d like to hear from you. We are looking for people who’d like to share some stories to help us test our map. We will send you a secret log in, allowing you to view and contribute to the map before it is launched. We’ll then ask you to feedback on your experience.

The memories are left anonymously with no username attached to them.

If you’d like to get involved, please email Abigail at info@mdmarchive.co.uk.

GEEK NOTE: This project is an experimental and evolving piece of work based on fusing third party protocols such as Google Maps and Web RTC. The latter, which is new open source software that allows you to record via browsers, is not currently FULLY compatible with iPhones, iPads and Safari. For the best experience, we recommend using a desktop or laptop computer running Chrome or Opera.

The Lapsed Clubber Project is a Heritage Lottery Funded Project based at Manchester Metropolitan University and run by Dr Beate Peter in partnership with Manchester Digital Music Archive (Abigail Ward), Go Bang Design (Ashley Kennerley) and Pin Studio (Paul Hemmingfield).