Paul Tan, a founding member of the Opus Collective recounts his experianceof the eary days of Opus.

Opus Collective began some time in 1994 as a group of electronic musicians
and electronic music fans communicating with each other over internet, on a
mailing list called "Vivisect" run by Joe Stojsic.  Joe started organizing
the occasional get-together, typically attended by 10-20 people.  Some
brought songs they'd written and produced, others brought booze, and
generally we had harmless good fun and talked music and life.  Joe and I
became good friends and together decided to form a proper musicians'
collective with the goal of promoting local electronic music and releasing
CDs of the collective's work.

In 1995 a committee was established to run the 1st CD project.  It consisted
of Damien Verna, Tony Stott and myself.  A number of the submissions and
artists were electro-pop, while others were more hard techno or experimental
electronic.  I can't remember when, but Joe decided to opt out of Opus
somewhere along the line, as his tastes were more toward the industrial,
alternative end of the spectrum and Opus was perhaps too pop.  Joe moved
over to Clan Analogue.

The CD was pretty decent, but the artwork was low quality.  I'm still
reasonably proud of our first effort in getting a CD out, but the quality of
our output has certainly improved since then.  We didn't actually have
enough paid submissions from members to finance the whole CD.  I think we
were 3 tracks short.  So if I remember correctly, Damien and I paid for
tracks by This Digital Ocean, The Pagan (Josh Abrahams) and perhaps one
other (Foil?  I think Foil actually paid for inclusion) to be included.  The
idea was to include some acts with known brandnames to bolster the
popularity of the CD.  Oh yes, it was Voiteck, we had a Voiteck track on the
CD as well, which Damien and I paid for.  There was much debate in the
committee and in the larger organisation about whether we should only have
member acts on the CD and whether we should finance the "brandname"
non-member tracks.  I was in favour of getting non-member acts partly
because we didn't have enough member submissions and partly in order to
raise the Opus CD's profile.  Since there was no membership fee, the
non-members were deemed honorary members simply by appearing on the CD and
we could list them on our promotional posters.  I think it helped our first
gig gain some interest in the press.  We did actually want the more known
acts to become active members but with the exception of David from Real
Life, they were unwilling.

I took on the leadership role and was the main organiser of meetings for a
while.  I also got heavily involved in organising live events featuring Opus
acts.  The gigs began with a launch for the 1st CD at the Corner Hotel in
Richmond.  I think we had 300 people show up, a great result, but at the
time it was disappointing for me as I had hoped for more.  It was the first
gig I ever organised and I had thought we might expect 5-600.  Plus, I spent
bucketloads of my own money promoting it and am still a few hundred out of
pocket :).  We put up about 500 or more colour A3 posters around town
(thanks to Andrew from Foil for design assistance), and I must commend Joe
on his efforts here as, even though he was not really excited about the
direction of Opus, he helped a lot in going on midnight poster runs with me.
Thanks also to all the bands who played and pulled all their crowd along!
We also had a number of gigs at places like the Lounge (2 months residency
on Sundays) plus other places like Cherry Tree, Punters Club, Tote, Espy,
with mixed success.  Some good turnouts, some quiet ones.  I was very
passionate about it all in those days and really worked my butt off finding
gigs and promoting them.  First World, my own band, began playing live
sometime after the CD Launch.  The acts that played several gigs were First
World, Sine, About Six Feet, Chiron, Static Icon, Occam's Razor, Ragewar and
a few bands which weren't members of Opus but were happy to join in the
shows, like Control and Screwtape.  If I remember correctly, Xaeja,
Subliminal Playground and Foil and (anyone I've missed out?) also played
once at the launch gig.  Sandra began performing with Darren and Chris
(Doghowz) a bit later.  It was around then, she also put together the first
web site.  Real Life didn't actually play any Opus gigs, but David always
maintained a strong and valuable presence as an adviser and even played live
guitar in First World for a while.  I think Real Life needed a larger venue,
production and promotional budget, etc to do their show justice.

In 1996 I went overseas for 6 months.  David Sterry took over the CD project
and launched the very excellent Volume 2.  After this, I can't remember
clearly whether I was heavily involved in the management of Opus any more,
or whether it shifted over to Janette and Darren who very capably steered us
to new and interesting waters...  I'll leave it to them to talk about Volume
3 and other events.

For me, I've made some great friends and spent some time working hard to
produce and promote music I really enjoy, so it's been a fantastic ride

Paul Tan 2003