Throughout rock & roll’s varied permutations over the decades, there have been moments in time—years, days, fleeting instances—that have come to define an era, the changing of the guard, or perhaps simply a musical epiphany. Think of The Beatles’ arrival in New York, Bob Dylan going electric at Newport Folk Festival, the Sex Pistols’ interview with Bill Grundy—most of us were not present for such events, but are aware of them and their cultural impact. It’s odd to think that the release of a promotional cassette would have that kind of importance, but when nearly 30 years later it is still thought of as a seminal document and its title has come to define a certain style of music, then it surely holds some significant significance.

C86, the 23rd cassette in a series of tapes that British music weekly New Musical Express (a.k.a. NME) offered to its readers for mail order, didn’t set out to define or create a sound or scene, but rather simply capture some of the music that its compilers found to be exciting and exemplary of a certain shared aesthetic. As former NME scribe and one of those compilers Neil Taylor writes in the liner notes to Cherry Red’s recently released expanded edition of C86, “Was C86 intended to be the be-all and end-all of independent music at that time? Of course not.” However, the fact that the tape’s moniker has come to represent that indie sound shows that it tapped into something of the genre’s essence.

The original cassette contained 22 tracks from such notable bands as The Mighty Lemon Drops, The Pastels, We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It, and The Wedding Present, but also several others who have been lost to the sands of time. Looking at just the small list above, though, one can see that it was only a loose thread connecting many of the acts. Indeed, that one can describe any band’s sound as “C86” seems improbable. If anything, it’s a situation of “I can’t describe it, but I know it when I hear it.” Sure, many of the bands encapsulated shared a sweet tooth for Byrdsian guitar jangle, but there’s also the anemic, off-kilter art-student blues of Stump’s “Buffalo” and the chicken-scratched jazzbo funk of MacKenzies’ “Big Jim (There’s No Pubs in Heaven).” If anything, C86 revealed that there was something happening in the UK in the mid-80s that didn’t follow fashion, but blazed its own trail.

Taylor does an excellent job of detailing the development of the scene that nurtured these bands—the clubs, the labels, the fanzines—and how that culture related to what came before and after it. For this expanded edition, Cherry Red has added another 50 tracks on two CDs, a good portion of which have either never been released before or have never appeared on CD. Some of the bands now included should have been on the original release; The June Brides declined to be on the tape for fear of being pigeonholed, and The Jesus and Mary Chain were left off because, having signed to WEA, they were no longer independent. No doubt many of these were on the compilers’ original long list of possibilities, but it’s remarkable how true to the original release’s vision this set is at triple the cassette’s length. Cuts by the BMX Bandits, That Petrol Emotion, The Railway Children, Happy Mondays, Blue Aeroplanes, and Pop Will Eat Itself share the same dichotomy of veering wildly from one another while also possessing some kind of shambolic shared sensibility. Moreover, with stellar rare cuts from lesser-knowns like The Turncoats’ “One Breath” and King of the Slums’ “Spider Psychiatry,” these new additions also retain the sense of really capturing that time and not simply recapitulating well-known highlights. Like its original cassette predecessor (and perhaps more so), this edition of C86 reveals that self-made ingenuity and honest creativity were running rampant, resulting in a wealth of music that can never truly be replicated, despite the many attempts. Call it a sound, a movement, or whatever you will, C86 was and is an incredible time capsule of an incredible era.