The file is named info 2010922 comeon iq84 and belowsdlx.txt. It sits in a folder with nine audio files, none of which carry readable names, and the folder itself is called backup 2010 — the kind of label a blogger used right before the host deleted everything. Anyone who has downloaded a full archive of a Japanese cassette blog has met this file. The filename isn't random. It contains an upload date, a label fragment, a catalog number, and a second release reference, all compressed into a string that looks like a typo.
The "info" prefix is a file type, not a genre
The word info at the start marks the file as the text sheet that accompanied a tape rip. In Japanese DIY blog culture, the info file was usually copied from the label's insert or typed by the blogger directly from the J-card. It might contain the artist name, the title, the recording date, and sometimes the mailing address of the label. That prefix meant the blogger didn't have to explain what the file was — the content spoke for itself. In some archives, the info file is a .txt document; in others, it's a photograph of the insert. Either way, the filename prefix stays the same.
The convention is consistent enough across archives that it functions as a grammar. It's the same logic I traced in a piece on the secret language of Japanese cassette blog archives, where the filename blog 2 june 042014 turned out to be a date plus a post counter rather than a random string. Once you know the grammar, the filename becomes readable.
The date: 2010922 is an upload date, not a release date
2010922 parses as 2010-09-22. The first four digits are unambiguous; the remaining four resolve to September 22. Japanese bloggers rarely zero-padded the month, so 2010922 is the normal form, not a mistake.
What the date does not tell you is the release date. In most archives, the filename date is the day the blogger posted the rip. The tape itself could be from 1995 or 2005. This distinction matters for collectors trying to date a recording by the filename. The info file usually gives the recording date; the filename gives the upload date. They are different things.
A further caveat: when a second blogger re-uploaded a file from another archive, they often kept the original filename. The date then refers to the first upload, not the re-upload. A file named 2010922 might have been posted to the blog you downloaded it from in 2012, using a filename from 2010. Because the date was often the post slug as well, the filename can be used to locate the original post in the Internet Archive. A post from 2010-09-22 would have a URL containing that date, and the info file sometimes survived in the archive even when the audio links were dead.
"comeon": a truncated name and the problem of spaces
The comeon block is where the filename stops being a date and starts being a name. It's almost certainly a label or artist name with a space removed. The blogger typed comeon instead of come on because the filename convention on their server either banned spaces or made them inconvenient.
This creates a real identification problem. comeon could be:
- a label name (two words, no space)
- an artist name (two words, no space)
- a venue or event name
Without the info file, you can't tell. The practical move is to open the info file first and search for the string comeon or come on in its text. If the info file is missing, the audio files themselves may carry the name in their metadata — but many rips from this period have no metadata at all. Another obstacle: text files from Japanese blogs of this era were often saved in Shift-JIS encoding. A modern text editor may display the content as garbled characters. Opening the file in an editor that can switch encodings is a necessary step before searching.
"iq84": the catalog number that anchors the release
The most useful block is iq84. It follows the pattern of a label catalog number: a two-letter prefix, iq, and a sequential number, 84. This is the key that identifies the release. Catalog numbers are the most stable identifier in underground music; they survive even when artist names are misspelled and titles are lost.
If iq is the label prefix and 84 is the sequence position, the catalog would be at least 84 items deep. That's a substantial output for a DIY label — larger than a private tape, smaller than a commercial operation. The exact formatting, whether the label wrote IQ-84, IQ84, or iq-84, is something the info file should confirm.
Catalog numbers do collide. Two unrelated labels can use the same two-letter prefix, so iq84 alone is not a unique identifier. It has to be combined with the comeon fragment and the date to narrow the field. The search order matters: label fragment first, catalog number second, date third.
"and belowsdlx": the second item and the "below" convention
The word and is the strangest part of the filename. It suggests the blogger was composing a sentence: info, 2010-09-22, comeon iq84, and belowsdlx. This reading implies the post contained two releases, and the info file covered both — or that the blogger was listing the contents of the post in order. In the file-host era, a single post often carried links to several releases, and the blogger sometimes concatenated the names into one filename to keep the post together.
Before assuming the word and is a joiner, check whether it might be part of a name. Some artists and labels use "and" in their names. The same applies to below — it's a common word in ambient and drone titles, so the release title reading should not be dismissed.
belowsdlx is the hardest block. It can be parsed in two ways:
- "below" + "sdlx" — where
belowis a release title or a positional marker, andsdlxis a catalog suffix. - "belows" + "dlx" — where
belowsis a typo forbellows, a word that appears in experimental music titles, anddlxis the standard abbreviation fordeluxe.
The dlx reading is tempting because deluxe editions were common in the CD era, and the abbreviation appears in digital release naming. If belowsdlx is "Below SDLX" or "Below (Deluxe)", the filename is describing a second release in the same post.
The positional reading — below meaning the file was physically below the main entry in the blog layout — is also plausible. Some bloggers named files by their position on the page: above, below, main. This was more common in the early 2000s, before drag-and-drop interfaces made file placement automatic. In that reading, sdlx would be the actual catalog code of the second item.
A practical order of operations
When you find a file named like this, the order in which you examine it matters:
- Open the info file first. It usually contains the artist name and title in plain text.
- Note the upload date (2010-09-22) separately from any dates inside the info file.
- Extract the catalog number
iq84and search for it independently. - Treat
comeonas a fragment, not a full name. Search for bothcomeonandcome on. - If there are two releases in the post, the audio files will separate into two groups by file size or by the
andboundary in the filename. - Keep the original filename unchanged when you archive the file. The filename is part of the historical record.
The fragility of the record
Files like this one survive in strange ways. Often they come from a backup made on a dying hard drive, or from a web archive capture that missed the audio files but kept the text. The filename is sometimes all that remains of a release that was never documented anywhere else. The blogs themselves were often the only documentation these releases had. When the blog went down, the info file went with it — unless someone had downloaded it and kept the filename intact.
The same fragility is visible in what a dead hard drive reveals about Japanese underground music blogs — the recovered directories are full of files named by people who assumed the context would never disappear. The context did disappear, and the filenames are what survived.
The next time you find an info file in a folder of unreadable audio rips, do not rename it. Copy the filename into a text file alongside the catalog number and the upload date. That string — info 2010922 comeon iq84 and belowsdlx — is the only index entry that release may ever have. The tape itself might be lost; the filename is the archive.