Cassette Culture Revisited, Part I

{cassette albums on mp3}

Partially inspired by the dearth of music blogs that celebrate underground cassette releases (amongst other 80s musical ephemera), and driven also by the need to digitally preserve some great music, I've been slowly backing up select items from my collection of several hundred unique music cassettes, most of them acquired during my tenure as a weekly programmer on WFMU (1984-1999.)

In the 80s, before digital recording software and home-burned CD-Rs became the norm, single to multi-track cassette recording, mixing and mastering was a way for the inspired bedroom or basement musician(s) to preserve their genius for later distribution to their perceived public (or even just to a few friends.)  Cassettes were also the final distribution format for most of these artists, many having no illusions about (or interest in) ever getting a record deal.  Independent cassette "labels" started to pop up around the country (K, Sound of Pig) and in Europe (Staaltape, ADN).  Cassettes, for a short time, became a viable media for distributing independent music.  It soon became clear that music didn't have to be on vinyl to be valuable.

I created the Lo-Fi show in 1986, designed to be a weekly 30-minute segment of my WFMU program where such "home-recording" artists would be exclusively featured and celebrated.  For a brief overview of lo-fi music (which also gives me a nod) see this Wiki entry.

All tapes have been ripped to high-bitrate mp3 and archived with scans of the original inserts.

Het Zweet - self-titled cassette, 198? [.rar archive, 84MB]

At about the same time the home-recording boom was happening, Al Margolis started his Sound of Pig cassette label, globally distributing exclusive albums and compilations on cassette, mostly by artists in the realm of experimental/avant-garde/industrial music (not necessarily "home-recorded").  I treasure my library of Sound of Pig cassettes, most of them given to me by Al himself.  Today, Mr. Margolis (aka If, Bwana) runs Pogus Productions, still championing the outer fringes of sound (and still offering for sale much of the original SOP catalog on cassette for $5 a title.)

Het Zweet were a faceless Dutch outfit (likely one individual rather than a "band," and part of the original Staalplaat family of artists) that made hypnotic, minimalist percussive trance music, like a very low-gloss Test Dept.  I've always preferred this self-titled cassette (released as SOP 49) to the subsequent Dossier LP and earlier Forced Run material.

Odd-Ba - Lucid Dream (1988) and Verbal Atrocities! (198?) [.rar archive, 57MB]

Odd-Ba were a group of precocious stoners from Pearl River, NY, led by Jim Ehrlich and Dan Dwyer.  They sent me several great cassettes over the years for play on Lo-Fi, these 2 being my favorites.  Lucid Dream is a collection of deliciously bent pop tunes and avant-rock interludes, while Verbal Atrocities!, with its inspired vocalese, free-nonsense jams and half-assed renderings of popular songs, is a lo-fi heir to the Mothers of Invention and Firesign Theatre, while at the same time epitomizing the intimate, welcome-to-my-worldness of home-recorded cassettes.  Both tapes are probably best enjoyed in the same circumstances under which they were created (wink wink.)  (Note:  Only Side 1 of Verbal Atrocities! is presented here, as the original tape was so damaged from wear as to render Side 2 undubbable.)

More to come....

Comments

[zandar]

In college, some friends and I took Laurie Anderson's song title "Difficult Listening Hour" to heart and spent weeks compiling cassettes for each other. We would meet on weekends to enjoy the results. It was a contest; whoever produced the most unlistenable tape was deemed the "winner." After a few iterations it became obvious the usual run-of-the-mill squawking fervently and very closely at microphones would simply not do. Eventually I developed something I dubbed the Feedback Monster. I had a simple Radio Shack reverb unit and a cheap old amplifier that did not have fuse protection. Essentially I made a speaker play the role of the "mic" plugged into the reverb unit and the speaker for the amplifier simultanously. A newfangled amp would have blown a fuse immediately; this trusting old amp soldiered on, bearing the brunt of my assault admirably. The result shrieking and swooping mayhem I made by manipulating the input level, depth, and feedback level was dutifully dubbed onto a cassette deck plugged right into the tape loop of the amp. Listening to the tape, you certainly felt like you were RIGHT THERE. Needless to say I won that week (of course, all I had to do to win the week before was recite office supply product descriptions into a mic, through an orange road cone).

Your salute to DIY recordings have dredged up some priceless memories. Thanks!

[Rene]

Noteworthy is Belgian label Club Moral's release of their complete (mostly cassette) stocklist as podcasts.
http://clubmoralstocklist.podomatic.com

[Cherie Birkin]

Ok, I have a boring, Mac-moron question - how on earth do I open these RAR files on my Mac?? Is there freeware software I can get?

Thanks William, another amazing post - can't wait to hear these!

Cherie

[poesboes]

This is a marvelous initiative Mr. Berger! You've got one very happy listener here!

[WmMBerger]

Regarding .rar archives on a Mac: I figured that there was an application on a Mac that would open .rar archives - maybe the same thing OSX uses to create and open .zip files? Use of .rar files is so widespread on music blogs, there must be a way for Mac users to open them. I did find this:
http://www.soft32.com/download_122700.html
It seems to be an .rar app for Mac, with a free demo period, but I can't vouch for it. Any Mac users out there with suggestions? I think that I'll make future posts with .zip files, which if you have OSX or higher, are cross-platform compatible. Let me know if this is a real problem; I can re-post these 2 as .zips.

[MJB]

Bill Berger rules!! Yay!!

[S.N.]

There is a freeware program for opening .rar files on the Mac. It is called UnRarX. Very, very good.
--SN

[Mortimer Prime]

There is a gem of a program for Mac and Windows/PC (Caution, I don't know if it works with Linux or anything else.) It's freeware, and converts about 12 kinds of audio formats incl. .rar into .mp3 or .wav. It's called Switch. http://www.nch.com.au/switch I'm running OS 10.4.9, so I'm just going to assume that would be the best version to run this on. I'm also running it on an Intel Mac, so that's no problem either.

[sleeve]

I have been doing a blog mostly focusing on cassette-culture releases for a little while, so these posts are very welcome. Thanks!