I found VOL1 when I was shopping at Octopus Records, the artwork impressed me and the tracklist felt almost too cool to be something from MTV so I bought it. PS if youre in brooklyn, you need to hit that place up for the hardect cd collection ever PLUS most of them are $5 or less its amazing. Anyways, I played VOL1 and it was great and then found the second one on Ebay for like 8 bucks. Just got it in the mail today :)
These CDs are a byproduct of the show AMP that aired on MTV in the late 90s. From the Wiki - "Amp is a music video program on MTV that aired from 1996 to 2001. It was aimed at the electronic music and rave crowd and was responsible for exposing many electronica acts to the mainstream. When co-creator Todd Mueller (who had worked on this with V. Owen Bush, Amy Finnerty and show co-creator, on air music video dj Burle Avant 1996-1997) left the show in 1998, it was redubbed Amp 2.0. The show aired some 46 episodes in total over its 6-year run. In its final two years, reruns were usually shown from earlier years. Amp's time slot was moved around quite a bit, but the show usually aired late at night or in the early morning hours on the weekend. Because of this late night time slot, the show developed a small but cult like following."
There are only 2 volumes of the MTV AMP CD. Everything about these albums is interesting to me, from the aesthetic to the track selection to the fact that only two volumes were put out. Brings to mind all of the teen-rated media from MTV that I was wathcing before I was 10 years old... mostly the cartoons, stuff like Daria, Beavis + Butthead, Aeon Flux, Celebrity Deathmatch, and even The Real World x Road Rules stuff, all of these things made me think I was in tune with popular culture and made me think that I stood out from my peers; although i was more often watching Nickelodeon and Disney Channel kids shows, I got a very healthy dose of this OTHER stuff, and that somehow made me different than the other kids. These albums validate the feelings I had as a child about MTV being cutting edge, these were released almost 30 years ago and still feel very relevant to my life.
***i scanned the inserts for your viewing pleasure.
SCROLLING IMAGE GALLERY BELOW OF THE CDS + INSERTS***
