Yesoteric: Non-Chronicles (20 parts) & Chronicles (14 parts)
What is "Yesoteric"?

The Yesoteric Tape collection was a most laudable effort started by fans, through the Notes From The Edge e-mail newsletter as a reaction to bootsellers, in an effort to get the music to fans without filling the pockets of people not connected to the band. You can do a newsletter archival search on it at www.nfte.org to see how it all came about. Its purpose was to attempt to collect as many rare live tracks, B-sides, remixes, and the like in one obtainable collection.

One could say that it was truly one of the first organized attempts by Yes fans to help each other out, help all this great music get heard by people, and also undermine the bootleggers who sell for profit.

It was set up as strictly a "trade", or "Blanks and Postage / cover the costs" deal. No money was to be made off of it. There were voluntary semi-official "regional tape duplicators" at one time who could be contacted for full or partial sets.

But Yesoteric was not without its problems.

First off, the project quickly became unwieldy as it quickly grew to 25 tapes and eventually grew to at least 29. There may be more for all we know. If a duplicator received 10 requests, that required making 250 tapes! (Later, organized efforts were made to circulate Yesoteric 6 tapes at a time via trading tress)

Second, the internet was still a relatively new thing. There were a couple of cases of duplicators trying to charge money for the tapes or duplicators not seeing their obligations through. Frankly, given the tasks the duplicators were taking on (although they DID volunteer), it's understandable how they could quickly just look at the pile of tapes ahead of them with utter despair!! :-)

Also, CDRs were not too prevalent at the time, so the media for circulating these were tapes, thus, the guy who organized Yesoteric (Jeremy Weissenburger, a first class gentleman) was getting at LEAST 2nd generation copies, which were then copied for the regional duplicators who then passed them on to others who often passed them on. Thus, most people
received at least 4th generation tapes, if not worse, because in some cases the original sources were already high gen bootlegs.

However, some truly rare GEMS were unearthed...

In an attempt to mitigate the problem of circulating these via tape, one or more of the tape duplicators went through the effort of converting most of the best Yesoteric had to offer to MP3s and upload them to a website, hosted by Southside.org.

Alas, the band was NOT happy about this turn of events, due to the circulation of demos that were NOT intended for public consumption and which were in at least one case, stolen from a band member's home. Their management threatened a lawsuit and the site was taken down.

When NFTE became an official band fan site, NFTE decided to disavow themselves from Yesoteric altogether, even to the point of censoring any further mention of it in their newsletter. Most circulation of it from that point on was conducted via the newsgroup alt.music.yes, which is
a completely un-moderated forum. Most of what is on there is obtainable through better sounding sources anyway.

Apparently, there have been attempts to organize the 25-29 tape mishmash of material and organize the best of them into a CDR set.
This version follows the transformation into 9 MP3 CDs by Simon Funnell (15 November 2000): 20 non-chronicle parts and 14 chronicle parts.

Volume 5 - CD9 - Chronicles 13 - 1991-1994
01 Trevor Rabin Soundcheck
02 Steve Howe Soundcheck
03 Bill and Alan Duet
04 Rick Wakeman Solo
05 Shock To The System
06 Lift Me Up
07 All's A Chord
08 Saving My Heart
09 Where Will You Be
10 I Am Waiting
11 State Of Play

Volume 5 - CD9 - Chronicles 14 - 1994
01 Walls
02 The Calling
03 I Am Waiting
04 Real Love
05 Where Will You Be?
06 Walls
07 Endless Dream

Vol.5-CD9
13 - 1991-1994
1 Yes Trevor Rabin Soundcheck Live Seattle, WA 21-05-91 0:04:48
2 Yes Steve Howe Soundcheck Live Seattle, WA 21-05-91 0:01:43
3 Yes Bill and Alan Duet Live Wembley Arena 28-06-91 0:04:16
4 Yes Rick Wakeman Solo Live Wembley Arena 28-06-91 0:04:19
5 Yes Shock To The System Live Wembley Arena 28-06-91 0:06:05
6 Yes Lift Me Up Live Wembley Arena 28-06-91 0:08:32
7 Yes All's A Chord Live Nagoya, Japan 03-03-92 0:02:38
8 Yes Saving My Heart Live Japan 01-04-92 0:05:27
9 Yes Where Will You Be Demo 01-01-94 0:05:47
10 Yes I Am Waiting Demo 01-01-94 0:07:39
11 Yes State Of Play Demo 01-01-94 0:04:27
0:55:41

Vol.5-CD9
14 - 1994
1 Yes Walls Live David Letterman Show 20-06-94 0:03:37
2 Yes The Calling Live Las Vegas, NV 27-07-94 0:06:26
3 Yes I Am Waiting Live Las Vegas, NV 27-07-94 0:07:32
4 Yes Real Love Live Las Vegas, NV 27-07-94 0:09:28
5 Yes Where Will You Be? Live Las Vegas, NV 27-07-94 0:07:28
6 Yes Walls Live Las Vegas, NV 27-07-94 0:05:54
7 Yes Endless Dream Live Las Vegas, NV 27-07-94 0:20:02
1:00:27