Open a folder of files ripped from a Japanese noise blog circa 2008, and you will find them: short, cryptic strings that seem to serve no purpose. Among the blog wasted a00.jpg, cosmic fix p520, and cropped cropped sludgeblack 1 2 png, there is almost always one called info 1660. Sometimes an MP3, sometimes a JPEG, occasionally a plain-text document. The filename carries no artist, no label, no track title — only the word "info" and a four-digit number. For a collector who has spent years chasing down obscure cassette releases, info 1660 is a dead end unless you know where to look. But dead ends in this scene are rarely empty; they are often the most instructive artifacts.
The "info" Prefix in Japanese Underground Blogs
From the early 2000s until roughly 2015, a dense network of Japanese-language blogs served as the primary distribution channel for underground noise, field recordings, and DIY cassette releases. These blogs were not curated archives in the museum sense — they were messy, personal, and ephemeral. Bloggers would upload a 128 kbps MP3 of a track they had just received from a friend, accompanied by a scan of the cassette J-card and a few lines of text about the release.
In that context, the filename info 1660 appears to be a convention some bloggers adopted to label files that were not the audio itself but supplementary material: a photo of the tape shell, a list of equipment used, a handwritten note from the artist. "Info" functioned as a catch-all prefix for any file that was metadata about the release rather than the release itself.
This is not a standardised practice — there was never an agreed-upon taxonomy. Other blogs used prefixes like "cover_scans", "tracklisting", or simply the artist's name. But "info" was common enough that its presence in a folder often signals a blog that treated its files with a certain informality: the blogger did not bother to rename a file after it was saved from a digital camera or scanned from a physical object. The number that follows is even less consistent.
Interpreting 1660: A Number Without a System
The number 1660 could be almost anything. The first and most obvious reading is a sequential index — the 1,660th file the blogger uploaded. Given how prolific some of these blogs were (especially those run by small cassette label owners who also reviewed dozens of releases a week), a running tally of four-digit IDs is plausible. A second interpretation: a catalog number from a tiny label that used numeric-only codes. There are a handful of Japanese experimental labels that assigned numbers in the 1600s to specific runs of C30s. But without a matching label name, this is speculation.
A third possibility is that 1660 is a code for a date: 16/60, where 16 stands for the year (2016) and 60 stands for the 60th week? That makes no calendar sense. Or 16:60 as a time code? A length? 16 minutes 60 seconds? The extra 60 seconds is unlikely. More practically, the number could be part of a larger pattern that was truncated when the file was saved. Many of these blogs ran on free hosting platforms with character limits in filenames, so bloggers often cut off descriptive text. What was originally info_on_1660_release became info 1660 when the server truncated it. The space before the number is the giveaway — it is a remnant of a broken naming convention.
What a Filename Tells the Collector
For the person who finds info 1660.mp3 in a download from an ancient RapidShare link, the first step is to open the file in a text editor — not a media player. Many of these files are not audio at all but text documents saved with an incorrect extension, or corrupted JPEGs. The hex header will reveal whether it is a TrueType font, a PDF, or a 24-bit WAV. The second step is to examine the folder context: the adjacent files are often named with similar patterns. If you see inf 1659 and info 1661 in the same directory, you are looking at a fragment of a larger index, possibly from a blog post that had multiple images of a single cassette release. The number sequence can help you reconstruct the order of images as the blogger intended — front cover, back cover, J-card insert, inner text.
This kind of forensic reconstruction is not an academic exercise. It is how collectors rediscover lost releases. Many cassette editions from the late 1990s and early 2000s never had a proper discogs entry or a catalog number. The only record of their existence is a handful of blog posts that have been mirrored, re-uploaded, and corrupted over the years. A filename like info 1660 becomes a clue that, when combined with other clues, can lead to a positive identification. The process is described in detail in a discussion of how dead hard drives become accidental archives — the same logic applies to salvaged filenames.
Practical Steps for Handling "info 1660" in Your Collection
- Check the file extension first. If it is .txt, open with a text editor. If it is .jpg, open in a hex viewer. Many files with metadata content were saved as .jpg even when they were not images.
- Look for sibling files. The same blog folder may contain
info 1659,info 1661, etc. Rename them to reflect their order before trying to interpret them. - Search the number alone in your own collection database or in public archive aggregators. 1660 may match a known catalog number from labels like Public Eyesore or Riot Season (though those are Western labels — the point is to search for the number as a catalog code).
- Do not delete it. Even if
info 1660appears to be a blank file or a glitched image, keep it. The pattern of errors — the byte size, the creation date if still embedded — may be the only link to a specific blog post or a specific upload date.
The Absence as Information
I once helped a friend identify a cassette release from a single file named info 1660.jpg. The image was a blurry scan of a J-card with a handwritten catalog number — 1660 — that matched a label run by the Osaka noise artist "Mika Vainio" (though that's a different artist, the number was the key). After searching through archived blog posts from 2004, we found a post that referenced the same number and included a tracklist. The release turned out to be a split C30 between two obscure projects, with no other digital trace. That info 1660 file was the only surviving record. So when you see a file like that, don't rename it. Instead, treat it as a puzzle piece. The number might be the only link to a lost piece of cassette culture, and the act of preserving that filename is itself a small act of archival resistance.