Hello. This site is a small memorial to the BlissCo Forum, the fan community attached to Bliss Corporation that lived at blisscoforum.com from 2002 until 2008. It exists because the forum is where I made most of the friendships of my late teens and early twenties, the kind that crossed continents and time zones and taught me, a kid in the United States, that Italian dance music was a whole world. One of the friends I made there was Vanessa.
Vanessa passed away in August 2007, when she was twenty. The archive of her music lives at vanessathemusician.com, the main memorial I built for her across 2025 and 2026. This site, the one you are reading now, is the sister to that one. It is about the place we met. The community that scattered after she died. The people I have been quietly trying to put back in touch with each other.
The letter that follows was the first thing I drafted for her archive. It never landed there, because that site is about her, the music, the catalog, the life she built. This one is more about me, about the room we were both in twenty years ago, and about the friendships that room produced. So it lives here instead, where the friendships actually started.
I was afraid I wouldn't know what I was doing. I was afraid I wouldn't do justice to my friend. At the end of 2025, the fear quieted down enough for the desire to be louder. Then the desire quieted down enough for the need to be louder. And I finally got to work.
I met Vanessa on the internet, the way many of us met our closest friends back then. The song "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" came out in 1999, and it was the first piece of music that ever felt like it was mine, rather than something handed to me by my parents or my school. So I went looking for more, and I ended up on the Bliss Corporation forum, the community Eiffel 65's Italian label ran for fans of the band. That forum was where I learned Italian dance music was a whole world. It was where I started making friends across the planet that a kid in the United States had no business expecting to make. And somehow, one of those friends became my best one. We swapped MSN names, then AIM names. We got to know each other.
She told me she was making music with a program called Fruity Loops. That was the first time it ever occurred to me that a person could compose songs on a computer. I'd been playing piano as an amateur, and the idea of finishing real-sounding tracks at home felt like science fiction. I told her about my love for building websites, putting things online, putting little communities together. We talked about ordinary things. Our families. Our schools. The parts of our days. I knew Vanessa for longer than I knew most of my high school friends.
At some point I asked if I could build her a fan site, and she said yes. We talked about everything she wanted on it. The music. The violin. Her sisters. Her bunnies. Her cat. The orchids she had named. Her passions were big and specific, and she was generous with them. Around the same time, I started a small community of my own called DragonSiblings, and she was one of the first people to show up. My friends there got to meet her, hear her demos, give her feedback on her songs. It was a small audience, before MySpace or Facebook turned that idea into an industry, but it was a real one. A lot of what I've been able to recover for this archive comes from what she wrote in those threads. Her thoughts on her own songs. Where a track had come from. Her sense of humor when she would post a new mix and sign off, "Here you go, Todd. lol."
· pull quote ·You could tell her "I had this idea for a Japanese fireworks song," sketch what you were imagining, and forty-eight hours later there would be a demo waiting for you.
What I remember most about her as a musician is the speed. You could tell her in a chat window, "I had this idea for a Japanese fireworks song," sketch what you were imagining, and forty-eight hours later there would be a demo waiting for you. Another day after that, a finished track. She was prolific in a way that almost embarrassed the rest of us. Reading the catalog on this site, you can see it. Dozens of finished songs. Dozens more we know existed and are still missing. That pace was the whole point of her.
For a long time, anyone genuinely looking for her music could find it. It lived on her MySpace page, the way music lived for almost everyone in the late 2000s. Then in 2018, MySpace's servers quietly erased a decade of artist uploads, hers among them. After that, her catalog was scattered across friends' hard drives, burned CDs in attics, forum threads on domains nobody renewed. From November 2025 until today, I've done my best to put it back together. I'll never know if I've found everything I could possibly find. But I'm confident the archive in front of you is now the most complete public record of her music anywhere.
Putting it back together meant doing some things I'm not naturally comfortable with. I'm a shy and respectful person, and reaching out to people I'd never met in real life took something out of me. I looked up old phone numbers and email addresses. I sent messages that came back as wrong-number replies. I sent a lot more that no one ever answered. But I also found people. Amanda, who'd kept twenty-six tracks on her hard drive for almost twenty years, sent every one of them in March. John, who wrote lyrics with Vanessa, transcribed nine more songs from the CDs he'd burned at the time. René, who lived in the Netherlands and named the album Vantastic back in 2004, wrote back saying he couldn't believe what he was reading. Suzanne, who had called Vanessa her "lil sister" on the forum twenty years ago, came back into contact like no time had passed.
· from the same letter ·Reconnecting some of that community has been one of the most meaningful things I've ever done.
What I learned, doing this, is that a whole community of people loved her, each of us in our own way, for our own reasons. Reconnecting some of that community has been one of the most meaningful things I've ever done.
So this is my note for now. The archive in front of you is going to stay online for as long as I'm alive. I've also mirrored everything to public archive sites and code repositories that, with any luck, will outlast me. My ask of you, the listener, is simple. Enjoy these songs. Share them. Download them. Keep a copy somewhere. The whole point of finishing a song was always for someone, somewhere, to hear it. Twenty years later, that part is finally working again.
If you knew her, and you have something I don't have, an MP3 I haven't heard, a lyric sheet I haven't seen, a memory, a story, please reach out through the contact page. The most recent recoveries arrived twenty years after she finished the music. There is always more out there.
Thank you for being here.
Todd
archive author