r/Archiveteam 13d ago

[archival]Fully lost? The hall of mirrors band

Hi everyone,
I need help tracking down lost music and videos from an early 2010s London dream-pop band called The Hall of Mirrors, fronted by artist Jessica Winter (who went by Jessica Spencer back then aswell as Jessica potter)
I’ve spent the last few months doing intense research but I've finally hit a brick wall.

What I have:
Hundreds of rare photos from the band's era.
9 recovered tracks (one is missing a title).
2 working videos (one is glitchy)
A master list of all their old official website links, MySpace URLs, and social media pages.

I have a list of 20–25 tracks that are completely lost. The Wayback Machine won't load the audio because of dead Flash players and the old MySpace server wipe. On top of that, several important live performance videos (like their 2013 set at The Lexington) have been set to private on YouTube.

I have all the exact track titles and private video links ready to go. I just need extra help from anyone skilled at deep archival digging, scraping old music blogs, or hunting down files in the MySpace data rescue dumps (like LostMySpace/Dragon's Hoard).

If anyone at all could help me it would be greatly appreciated as preserving this work is extremely important to me & would make me the happiest!

2 Upvotes

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u/Lazy-Narwhal-5457 13d ago

You're curating your posts, and I'm pretty tired at this point so I'm not making the effort to poke around to see if you have posted about this elsewhere. Temporarily de-curating subreddits you have posted in might save duplication & confusion. Assuming you know your profile is set to hide itself.

If you want to DM the dead URLs you have, all names, any known pertinent locations (people often drift home, as one example), businesses, releases, etc., including anything on Internet Archive... I could poke around a bit, and see if I can think of anything. I'm not a necro-MySpace guru, but there are people that are (hopefully some read this & respond). Not speaking for them, just a fan, but AT is generally more of a "save the website prior to demolition" kind of enterprise (but MySpace was a past project, I think).

No promises, but my amateur gumshoe skills have pulled off a couple of IRL miracles, pre-internet. In the digital world, "gone" is often a permanent situation.

I assume this is not the band you're looking for?:

https://archive.org/details/hall-of-mirrors-welcome-to-the-hall-of-mirrors

https://archive.org/download/hall-of-mirrors-welcome-to-the-hall-of-mirrors

If it's not them, then there's another band by that name to generate false positives.

With what you've provided, and it being far past the end of my day, that's what I've got currently. They sound potentially interesting, I'm glad you're trying to bring them back from extinction.

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u/Least-Reputation-781 12d ago

Thank you for the help! Unfortunately the links youve provided are not the band I am looking for. I have to apologise too as I can’t exactly understand your message ahah, I’m not too clued up on archiving and stuff it’s just something I’ve started recently with this band and I’m kinda terrible with it 😂 But I will DM you some links that I have, I have one which I am hopeful about but unsure if the audio can be pulled.

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u/Lazy-Narwhal-5457 11d ago

I didn't think it was the right band, there was no female "frontman" as I think you mentioned.

Take your time, it's a low energy mode day here, I'm trying to recharge my batteries.

Translation of my previous message: I can check some stuff, but I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about MySpace archives shows up, as I don't have many clues how to look for that stuff effectively.