A thread for cassettes

I am very interested in them recently, but only have like three or four

http://nickdouglas.googlepages.com/blacksabbathcassette.JPG

http://nickdouglas.googlepages.com/ssposter.jpg

http://www.fuckittapes.com/fuckittapes.htm

I still have lots of great cassettes; it was my primary format of music until 1994, when I got my first CD player. But unfortunately I don't have a working cassette player anymore, and I'd imagine it would be quite hard to get a new one these days.

Remember the time when you actually taped songs from the radio? You'd have a cassette ready in the deck and you had to be prepared to press the rec button immediately after the DJ announced the next song. And it was so irritating when the DJs spoke on top of songs! Why couldn't they just play them full? Maybe there was some secret agreement between radio DJs and the record industry, so that the DJs would speak on top of songs so people couldn't tape proper versions of them off the radio, and had to buy them instead.

^^^good label, need to keep up with their shit as I didn't know they had an MV+EE thing among other stuff

xpost re: fuckittapes

Tuomas is there an equivalent of craigslist.com or gumtree.com or whatever in Finland? I bet you could find someone literally giving away a working tape player within like five minutes of browsing

We have a tape player at work, and my friend got this huge box of mix tapes some guy made when he was in college in the early 90s. It's pretty funny listening to it, it's full of like Liz Phair and Slowdive and New Order.

I make tapes all the time.

named 'tape store' for a reason

Tuomas, that "DJ's talking over the top of records" thing used to drive me nuts. I don't think it was a deliberate tactic to make recording off the radio difficult - just that most DJs love the sound of their own voice!

Does anyone here remember a link someone posted a few years ago that went to a webpage of all these zillions of different brands/lengths of cassette tapes? I would appreciate it if someone could point me to that site again.

i just lov cassettes. i still have some of my fave albums on cassette

i mean i still like walk arond with a walkman. mhmm

I ordered that Warmer Milks tape from fuckittapes earlier today actually.

Releasing stuff on a cassette in 2008 c/d?

I've always hated cassette tapes. Hated having to wait during fast-foward/rewind, and then not knowing for sure where you're skipping to (unless you go all the way to the end or beginning of the side, obv). Also, they always got eaten up in tape decks, and they'd melt if they were left in hot cars

http://www.slippytown.com/ggcass.jpg

I still have this on cassette along with many other titles on ROIR, the greatest cassette-only label ever (until they started re-releasing them all on cd).

i don't really like tapes - the type of damage they're susceptible to is more severe than damage to records (although in many other ways they're a lot more hardwearing. also they generally sound like crap if they're not chrome or metal tapes (and sometimes even if they are)

i do dig a lot of the tape label stuff from the 80s & early 90s but that's despite the format not because of

I miss the word "cassingle" but not the object to which it refers.

did you know cassingle is a trademark?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEED91531F931A3575AC0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

I used to buy That's (<-- this was the brand name) blank tapes, which boasted having high signal-noise ratio and tolerance to higher volumes. IT WERE TRUE. You could turn up those buggers to an insanely high volume and there'd be no distortion.

Other brands of note: Denon, Raks (Turkish)

Moving soon and my wife and I tossed about 100 of them, some were 20 years old. It was tough in a way but also felt good. Still have maybe 40 that we couldn't get rid of. I like cassettes.

xp omg this is the same brand

http://211.78.161.57/res/gdsale/st_pic/0469/st-469997-s200.jpg

This thread reminds me of C90 strangeness

I got rid of all but a few of my tapes a couple of years ago when I moved into accommodation with almost no storage space. The onyl aspect of cassettes that I miss is the snobbery value of buying slick, beautiful high-end tape when I could afford it. I don't know how much difference it made to the sound but it felt nice.

I spent sixteen years commuting between Oxford and London and in those pre-Discman days the only way I got a chance to listen to music on my own was in the Oxford Tube coach there and back; consequently I still have an unfeasibly enormous amount of cassettes and remarkably nearly all of them are still in fine fettle with no warp or wear so I must have done something right. I wouldn't ever get rid of them.

The onyl aspect of cassettes that I miss is the snobbery value of buying slick, beautiful high-end tape when I could afford it. I don't know how much difference it made to the sound but it felt nice.

I hear ya, Daniel Giraffe. Sony SMMST in a ceramic shell - I still don't think I ever filled more than half a side of this:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/95/243430994_035127a9f5.jpg

I did fill this, but maybe jazz diva Tom Waits covers were a waste of an MA-XG (Rickie Lee Jones' Ghostyhead on the B-side):

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/91/243433021_ff13cbdb57.jpg

And this is what ultimately happens to tapes when you have kids:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/69/162650828_48d589e16b.jpg

Not pictured: Maxell Vertex, with gold-transfer lettering. I think The Prodigy is on that.

http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l107/taistar1661/cassette.gif

Boots and WH Smith own brand when I was skint, TDK and Memorex when I had the money.

I love how the SMMST has its own signature. Makes me feel like I should wear a tie when I go to record something onto it

Another similar thread:
What was your favorite cassette brand?

Phwoar, that's tape porn, Michael.

Ha, I posted practically the same images on that other 2005 thread.

http://copshootcop.com/other/images/headkickcassette.jpg

In 2006, Moss did a re-release of their "Tormented" demo tape in a limited run of 50 scary hand-made metal cases. Wish I had got one, they look great.

Here's tape pron:
http://orby.trideja.com/GeneratedItems/cassette/
...the images on this page take a couple of minutes to load.

http://copshootcop.com/other/images/headkickcassette.jpg

I has this EP. Do not be a hater, Alex.

Tapes def best for audiobooks.

I don't think alex is being a hater - that's his favorite band!

I had it on vinyl and stupidly lent it out to someone, never to be seen again.

Releasing stuff on a cassette in 2008 c/d?

classic! I'm planning on putting a cassette out this year.

How is posting an image making me a hater? Next to Killing Joke, Cop Shoot Cop was the best band on the fucking planet. I actually own three copies of this cassette -- one's still wrapped in case I lose/overplay/break the other two.

Oh, and I have it on vinyl as well.

No, I mean don't be a hater because I have the vinyl. But I guessed wrong, eh?

work/death's teenage heavy metal revisionism came in a cassette covered in spikes:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/workdeathtape.jpg

always thought metal and rap sounded better on cassette in the 80s.

and spacemen 3's the perfect prescription!

I used to read the sales pitch on the back of the packaging and get way too excited. 'omg a hyperferric emulsification layer with magnachrome coating!! i NEED this'

i have a big box of cassettes that i sadly have not had room enough in the car to bring back to oberlin with me. but i love cassettes. also, when the old ipod shuffle runs out of batteries in the car, i have over 40 tapes to choose from.

my favorite i've ever found is cassingle of a song by a guy named Joe Bracco. i will up it to this thread soon, it is a barrel of laughs.

thanks, snoball - beautiful!

here it is, folks. "Friend in My Pocket" by Joe Bracco. it gives me the tard tingles every time i listen to it. one of the best tapes i've ever found, hands-down.

Joe Bracco- Friend in My Pocket

and here is a page about him.

i mean, i'm gay and still i can't get over how funny this shit is. sad that he died of the horrid disease, but still.

http://www.queermusicheritage.us/oct2003j.html

(xxpost) Thanks, but I have to say that website isn't mine. Props to whoever made the site as it looks like it was a lot of work to put together. I just found it while searching for info on Memorex dB series tapes. I was lucky enough to score a box of twenty of these in the early 80's basically for free. The quality was only reasonable, but what impressed me was how well made they were and how much re-use they could stand.

I'm glad I'm old enough that my metal band put out a tape in high school. We got it pro duped and everything...it was cool getting the tape master, it seemed so technical and valuable.

For our second tape I had to sit there with a double tape deck and manually record a hundred copies or whatever, that was not as cool.

jordan can i buy a copy of your metal tape pleeze?

i don't think i have copies any more. :( actually i found some tapes the last time i moved, but i haven't had access to a tape player to see what's on them.

here is a review of our second tape that is still online somehow:

Shadowbox - Waiting For Dawn

Waiting For Dawn is Ben Wozak on Lead Vocals and Guitars, Jordan C0hen on Drums, Tom Johnston on Bass and Lew Snyder on Guitar.

Shadowbox is a 2-track demo, tracks are 'Shadowbox' and 'This Day'

The first track 'Shadowbox' is a fairly slow paced metal track reminiscent of early Black Sabbath. There's a good heavy guitar riff. The drums and bass have a good solid sound to them. Ben vocals are good and fit in well with the music. Towards the end of the track the whole thing gather's pace and there's an excellent guitar solo.

The second track is 'This Day', starting with a good heavy riff, good vocals from Ben. There's nice changes in direction and tempo, with some great guitar work and another excellent guitar solo.

After listening to these two tracks, all I can say is I wanted more....

Classic: That be-doo-doo-DOo-YEEP sound before and after most cassette albums released by Capitol in the eighties.

Didn't the first 5-6 seconds of Maxell's tapes start off with a head cleaner?

tapes suck just play cds, they dont get eaten and wont skip if your cat jumps on the table like vinyl

They do get scratched and aren't in analog.

tapes don't skip ever

It takes a lot less damage to make a CD unplayable compared to vinyl.

tapes suck just play cds, they dont get eaten and wont skip if your cat jumps on the table like vinyl.

the complete idiocy of this statement is almost overwhelming.

and yet it's mostly factually accurate

I love tapes. You can touch them.

electric sound, It takes a lot less damage to make a CD unplayable compared to vinyl.

sorry but that's actually right.

i mean, i have records that have scratches all over them and don't skip, don't pop (that much) and sound perfectly fine. i used to have CDs (i gave up on them about two years ago) that wouldn't play if they had a teeny scratch on them. CD players and CDs are fucking stupid, outmoded ways of listening to music, and it will be a fine fine day when they are abolished completely.

Ha: this is, to me, for all intents and purposes, the cover of every Smiths record apart from Strangeways:

http://orby.trideja.com/GeneratedItems/cassette/maxell_xl_2_90_a%5B1%5D.jpg

i don't believe i was commenting on that quote

also 'unplayable' is clearly subjective here

My car only plays tapes, so i still make mixTAPES all the time! Surely I'm not the only one????

i make tapes for friends all the time!
and i buy new tapes, from time to time.

I was quite pleased to find a place still stocking Type II cassettes for 4 track, field recording etc. Nice metal ones are still v. hard to come by.

Next time someone's about to bin their old tapes, please send to me instead.

did i already give you the tapes i had? i think i may have given them to sharr0n when i sold her the 4-track

i was happy when my car only played tapes, i rocked old shit and used the tape adapter for my ipod. then the tape deck broke, and i got a cd player that never doesn't skip. ;_; the direct in for the ipod is sweet, though.

Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes.

snoball, thanks for the awesome link. Haven't seen some of those in 20 years.
This is my personal favorite. My dad had the Talking Heads on one of these in the mid 80s and we used to drive around town listening to it:

http://nickdouglas.googlepages.com/maxell_xl_2_90_c1.jpg

"Epitaxial"

I have a bunch of cassettes of albums/songs I've taped off vinyl and CD along with some store bought cassettes I want to get rid of. Should I make a list here and see if anyone wants it all (I'd sent it to anyone for free) or should I just dump it all at the nearest thrift store?

night-people.org
pretty much everything on there is amazingeriffic.

also, http://www.notnotfun.com/presents/present.html

I will send all of the cassettes below for free to the first person on this thread who says s/he wants them. Preferably someone who lives in North America (I'm in the US).

So just say "I want them"

Original (store bought) -

Best of Macola - Volume One
David Bowie: Lodger
James Brown: I'm Real (NKOTB sleeve)
The Clean: Vehicle
Dennis Criteser/Jim Peterson: The Meaning O' Life
Terence Trent D'Arby - Introducing The Hardline...
Diesel Cats and The Jazz Explorers: In Search of Blue Treasure
Eleventh Dream Day: Lived to Tell
Freedom Fire - The Indestructible Beat of Soweto Vol. 3
Dora Hall - six cassettes from the Solo paper cup heiress (no sleeves)
Jason and the Scorchers: Fervor
Kool Moe Dee: How Ya Like Me Now
Les Rita Mitsouko: Présentent The No Comprendo
Craig Mack: "Flava In Ya Ear - Remix"
M/A/R/R/S: "Pump Up The Volume"/"Anitina"
Paul McCartney: "Figure of Eight"/"Ou Est Le Soleil?"
Mekons: Fun '90
Milli Vanilli: Girl You Know It's True
Monty Python Sings
Overweight Pooch: Female Preacher
Screaming Blue Messiahs: Bikini Red (no sleeve)
Spoonie Gee: The Godfather of Rap
Talking Heads: Naked
10,000 Maniacs: The Wishing Chair
10,000 Maniacs: Blind Man's Zoo
20 Greatest Hits 1967
Wire: Chairs Missing

Advance Cassettes -

The Amps: Pacer
Golden Throats 4: Celebrities Butcher The Beatles
Imperial Teen: What Is Not To Love
Modest Mouse: This Is A Long Drive...
Titanic: music as heard on the fateful voyage Ian Whitcomb & The White Star Orchestra
Victoria Williams: Loose

Taped Off Vinyl or CD -

LiLiPUT/Cult Hero

The Hits of House Are Here/Jackie Wilson

Various Pebbles tracks

hits from 1989-90

Weather Girls/Labelle/Ralphi Rosario/Outhere Brothers/20 Fingers/Hope: "Tree Frog"/Machine/

Tribe Called Quest/Michelle Shocked/Blondie/sly Fox

Shaggs/Pebbles Vol. 3/Throbbing Gristle/Yoko Ono/Butthole Surfers/Big Black/Pussy Galore/Mudhoney/Costes/X-Ray Spex/Jandek/me pretending to be Jandek

ABBA album tracks/acid house/C+C Music Factory/tracks from My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

Throbbing Gristle/Skinny Puppy/Severed heads/Test Dept./Bauhaus/Eno/David Byrne

Tracks from Rhino's Disco Years

Paula Abdul/1980s girl rap

Risqué Rhythm: Nasty 50's R&B

Techno/new beat

Lords of Acid: Lust/some songs from Oklahoma!(!)

Josef K

The Best of American Pop - An Audio History (as chosen by me)

Plexi: Cheer Up and some EPs

Nuggets II tracks

ABBA hits

Naughty by Nature, Housemartins, Jordy, PM Dawn, Big Star

A: Laid Back, "Dirty Cash," MC Luscious, Army of Lovers, Loleatta Holloway, Aztec Camera, Slick Rick
B: Lonnie Gordon, The Weather Girls, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Yazz, Yello, Ofra Haza, Bon Jovi, Tiffany, Men Without Hats

A: Candy Flip, Wee Papa Girls, Beat Masters, Beats Intl., Thrill Kill Kult, PE, Coldcut feat. Mark E. Smith, AWB, Egyptian Lover
B: Waitresses, Frankie Smith, Soft Cell, The Arrows, XTC, T.S. Monk: "Bon Bon Vie," Jackie WIlson

A: James Brown
B: Halo of Flies; Husker Du; Repulse Kava; Stooges; Barbarians; Butthole Surfers

A: Blondie: Parallel Lines
B: disco

A: Atmosphere: Lucy Ford
B; Womack & Womack: Conscience (incomplete)

A: Dionne Warwick: Anthology
B: Sinead O'Connor: The Lion and The Cobra/some long song I can't place

A: New Pornographers: Mass Romantic (with bits of Manfred Mann's Earth Band)
B: Roky Erickson; Mae West doing "Light My Fire" and "Twist and Shout;" The Left Banke; Can

A: Parliament: Osmium
B: Snap, Bow Wow Wow, techno, etc.

A: Stooges: Fun House
B: PiL; Bolshoi

A: Pussy Galore: Right Now!
B: PiL: Second Edition

A: Some Russian stuff (I think)
B: City High

A: Guitar Paradise of East Africa
B: Big Star: Third

A: Phil Spector
B: MC Lyte

a bunch of SAW (or SAW-esque) productions

ABBA

DFX2: Emotion

Dusty Springfield: 24 Hours From Tulsa

DIMTHINGS: DIS-CI-PLINED 2 A SPONTANEOUS WAY OF LIFE

Dance Stuff - Erasure, Loleatta, Army of Lovers, etc.

Donna Summer, Ram Jam, Emotions, Freda Payne, Commodoes, etc.

Prince: Small Club Second Show That Night

Michelle Shocked: Short Sharp Shocked

Deep Heat (Telstar 1989)

Kym Sims: Too Blind To See It

Tons of 1970s shit - Andrea True, Taste of Honey, Marvin Gaye, Jimmy Buffett, David Geddes, Hot Chocolate, etc.

A really good New Beat comp (if you ever figure out which one, lemme know)

A tape I called Good Songs Someone Can Do Better - Frente/Cher/sounds like Ozzy/some pop punk tune/Satchel/fast, squishy techno track beginning with a female vice saying something abut "time stands still"

Victor Lundberg/bubblegum/Hot Chocolate

Some good mid-1990s house stuff (De'Lacy, remixes of Madonna, Air, Falco, etc.) mixed poorly by me

Horrifyingly mixed Sylvester/New Order/Wild Orchid/etc.

Beck/Carly Simon

Grease 1994 London Cast with Debbie Gibson as Sandy and we'll go from there.

If I don't hear from anyone by Monday, Salvation Army gets them.

That should be:

So just say "I want them" and we'll go from there.

If I don't hear from anyone by Monday, Salvation Army gets them.

um i'll take em?

LOL. Are you being serious?

totally dude i rock tapes like nobody's biz

send me emalez to ju5t1n5mith1✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧

ungoogleproofed of course

unless you meant like "pick a handful"

in which case i'd be glad to do that too

i always hated thinking that i was wrecking the player, while fast-forwarding in vain to find the track i wanted to hear

No they're all yours, Hoos. Emailing you now. Coming from AOL so check your spam (for some reason, my emails have been going to spam lately).

my tape deck just gave up on me, started eating tapes. one of those things doesnt spin anymore either. i really dont wanna lose this deck, got lotsa features, sturdy, this once was a very very pricey tape deck

so how do i fix that wheel that doesnt spin anymore?

My crappy Sony dictaphone/Walkman hybrid packed in the other week, so I borrowed some other model from this dude I work with. I swear the quality was better than my new Sony mp3 player. It had some ULTRA-BASS switch and graphic equalizer sliders. Where the fuck are the graphic equalizer slides on an mp3 player?? And of course with a cassette walkman, you're not endlessly seeking to the next track. Although I'm usually listening to a laboriously constructed mix tape of my own creation, which I've spent a week or two re-editing and re-editing until it's perfect. Thenyou can listen to it over and over and over for weeks.

Hated having to wait during fast-foward/rewind, and then not knowing for sure where you're skipping to (unless you go all the way to the end or beginning of the side, obv).

Except when you become one with your walkman, and you can rewind to the EXACT beginning of a track. Immense satisfaction.

Or you got a fancy-dan walkman which FFed to the start of the next track by itself - awesome.

That's assuming at least two seconds of silence between songs, though, so it didn't always work.

Cassettes and their linear navigation certainly promoted more of a patient attitude towards music than either records, before it, or mp3 and CD players, after it.

I have recently run across This Dude again. He's also into Janet Jackson cassingles.

I still buy cassettes occasionally, but have had to scale it way back due to the sheer bulk of them. The last big score was three or four years ago, when a local supermarket was selling like a truckload of 'em for a dime apiece. It was whole stocks of unsold stuff like just about a complete run of those spoken word albums on New Alliance, a lot of SST albums (Painted Willie - Trotsky Icepick - Slovenly - Universal Congress Of? Got 'em covered.) Best of all was a whole stack of obscure (to me) Latin albums -- it's where I discovered "El Jeque" by Tommy Olivencia and the super-amazing Barrio Band album.

Briana what did he say?

Sorry, "briania".

Oh, man, it was the same sort of deal: "HOW BIG OF A HIT WAS MISS YOU MUCH?" "JANET JACKSON WAS MORE POPULAR THAN MADONNA, RIGHT? *RIGHT*?!!" This guy really needs to be on ilx.

Maybe he could settle the Janet/Madonna beef once and for all.

I imagine him with a fisherman's hat pulled down tight over a buzzcut, dark socks, white sneakers.

woah.... twin cassette walkman!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sony-Walkman-WM-W800-2-Deck-Recording-Cassette-Player_W0QQitemZ160221888378QQihZ006QQcategoryZ15053QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1368/877000800_852dd35338_o.png

Hoos, I mailed you at the address above (which I may have fucked up) and through ILX. Did you get either?

I just got Richard Pryor's That Nigger's Crazy on cassette, 'cause I couldn't find it on CD. Probably get around to digitizing it sometime this century.

I believe I got in before the Hoos, Kevin:

Next time someone's about to bin their old tapes, please send to me instead.

-- S-, Thursday, January 24, 2008 12:38 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Link

However os postage is def. deal killer...

Ugh I didn't see that. Sorry.

Usually just listen to a lot of public radio in my car (no CD) but lately I've been rocking a bunch of 80s cassettes. Totally forgot how much I love the first Hoodoo Gurus.

nah dude i didn't get either email (?? :( ) but it seems s- has a def claim on them before me anyways if he wants em

Ok Hoos, you're still in the running.

S- where exactly do you live?

Hoos, I emailed (a name)(the number one) @ (that dot com). Is that wrong?

Email obscurer 1, HOOS 0.

Well, his goal is to obscure the email so...

Does anyone know where S- lives? I really want these cassettes outta my place.

j_u_s_t_i_n_s_m_i_t_h_1_9_8_6 at gmail dot com ?

Oh hells no! How the hell was I supposed to guess those last three numbers?

Anyhoo, if S- lives too far, I'll email you.

Nerdy lols-a-plenty here.

I'm in Australia dude, weight regardless, the size of the package would make postage astronomical.

Because Australia isn't far away enough, I am in New Zealand.

Pants on fire, dude.

You'll want to be wary of magnetic fields when mailing out cassettes these days, especially overseas. Magnetic Fields caution is just a good rule of thumb in general.

That pesky Stephin Merritt going through packages at customs!

Ok Hoos gets it.

Sorry S-. If you want, I can send you an mp3 CD as a consolation prize. Lemme know.

Fucking greedheads.

Pants on fire, dude.

-- libcrypt, Saturday, March 29, 2008 4:40 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

I was on fuckin' tour in NZ, libcrypt.xls

no probs Kevin

My friend's band just released a cassette spray painted purple and yellow that comes in an envelope sealed in beeswax

c/d: indie bands releasing singles on cassettes?

so fucking precious. dud

"precious"?

blame the people buying them if it really distresses you. some bands are way more likely to sell a tape than a cd these days

I blame everybody involved

idk i found out way too late that one of my favourite albums of all time also came out on cassette w/ a second tape of bonus material that does not feature on the cd version and which i have never found on the internet. this pisses me off.

ITT people who hate fun

what is fun about me never getting to hear music that would bring me joy

???

but then i guess you own all the bootlegs

cassettes are cheap to put out & no1 buys cds so

well ppl rip cds into rar files

what do people do with the cassetes once they buy it, do they then go to the thrift store and buy a boombox

cassettes are just fun! they are kinda cute and dirty. get a tape deck they're cheap and you won't regret it, one of my favorite artists ever released a tape-only album last year and I get more pleasure out of the tape than I probably would through the laptop or on lp - it's just a different vibe, putting a tape into the deck and hitting play. I can't keep up with how much good stuff there is on tape only right now so I hear you actually but there is an upside to cassettes for me, partly nostalgia but partly I don't know just like a different sort of object-relation.

xp my CD boombox w/tape deck has been my go-to way of listening to stuff in the kitchen for 10+ years so I didn't have to re-get a tape deck

if you want ppl to listen to your music on a shitty boombox then okay I guess

xp okay that makes sense - changing the nature of your relationship to the Object - I can see the appeal in that. itunes makes it a little too easy

gf has tape player in her car, plays them there

So many people around her still have tape decks in their cars. But they're mostly after Huey Lewis and J. Geils and shit.

its easy to put out small runs & theirs a ready mkt for cassettes way more than their wld be for cd-rs ime plus it has nostalgic charms, mb, at least 4 some ppl + theirs a tactile handmade quality idk id like to put out stuff on other formats but cassettes are p practical, sort of. also i mean any cassette release also probably gets released digitally so

i have a tape deck hooked up to home home stereo, also a small tape player i bought at goodwill that i use to transfer stuff to digital if necessary

btw dayo waiting until 2k11 to castigate cassette nostalgists is cracking me up and so is tape ppl being surprised to be considered dbs by right-thinking ppl, also if anybody owns the bonus tape of blank unstaring heirs of doom pls webmail me. peace.

i am not a tape ppl ftr, i hate physical media these days by and large

what is dbs, btw my exposure to trends in the chillwaveosphere is pretty much limited to ILM, so I'm pretty behind on the nostalgia revival

also theres stuff like the tapeworm releases that try to get artists to think abt the medium itself, how that effects the listening xp, how the nature of tape plays into the way the music 'lives' thats p interesting & worthwhile

i hate all physical things, when can i leave this body and be air

this revive was prompted by a fb status that said "plus, this band will be selling singles on CASSETTES."

like, wow!

dbs stands for douchebags probably

yeah idk i like cassettes or the idea of cassettes but im also v tired & v sad, music has the right to its antecedents

maybe in 20 years ppl will be trading youtube links like "remember when we used to play the new cassie single off of youtube" "yeah man nothing like staring at those jpg embeds"

i have a pile of tapes that i bought back when i was making these tape experiment things in school that i've been meaning to do something w/. i got reminded when i found an mp3 of one i had made on my harddrive today. its not great.

maybe in 20 years ppl will be trading youtube links like "remember when we used to play the new cassie single off of youtube" "yeah man nothing like staring at those jpg embeds"

― dayo, Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:14 AM (3 seconds ago)

a part of me broke when they took geocities down btw

i hate all physical things, when can i leave this body and be air

why was this necessary

sorry for not having unlimited space to stuff a million chillwave tapes

uh i was not making a dig at u in any way shape or form?

ok

this reminds me of when I tried to get into vinyl, I bought a dual turntable off of craigslist and built a DIY line out thingy and hooked it up to my speakers and everything, and when I played my first LP on it (abandoned luncheonette from goodwill) it sounded like shit, so thin and scratchy, I have never set it up again, idk if my cartridge was bad or not calibrated or something, I tried looking for info online but it was a bunch of vinyl nerds talking about $500 cartridges and I gave up

anyone pretending than selling music on tapes in 2011 is about anything other than nostalgia is kidding themselves. nostalgia is a totally valid reason to do something. but that is all it is about.

and i agree with mr. steven tyler that tapes sound "great" but they ultimately only sound "great" to me because that's how i listened to music when i was 14.

you should have built a dream machine w/ it

one of the things i like abt chillwave/whinehaus/subwave is how much affection it has for the geocities aesthetic. i miss html 2.

i dont even care abt sound i mean i do but yknow i dont ~CARE~ enough to have preferences and opinions i like things tho, i like feeling connected to ppl via objects in time/space & feel good when ppl have little drawings or cards or w/e in the tapes they sell you - i always put some in mine - its v obvs or w/e of course

tapes can sound pretty nice imo

lamp you should like sell me a tape, i would have to like send you the money in cash form tho bc idk its an endless struggle

Isn't it more fun to spell out douchebags than abbreviating it?

dbs stands for douchebags

http://i.imgur.com/QPUGO.jpg

you guys i made that joke already

or are you just nostalgic

always

ill trade you a copy of the 80s fan cd single for the untidy towns 7"

i have the former and not the latter :(

man it's like I don't really care enough to argue but I do think object-relation is a real thing. I listened to a lot of music direct from iTunes to the stereo today, but the nature of the interface means it all kind of blurred together. then I listened to a couple of CDs I got in the mail and those I remembered & had a more interesting time with. Tapes are like that but more so, because they're weird and anachronous.

no I totally get you on that relationship, I shoot film and part of the reason is that I feel so much more involved w/ the process than digital

yah i guess, when iwas in america i had all my photos developed together at the end, 3 months worth, and im p clueless so only a fraction actually came out but yeah i mean digital is a totally diff experience there

one of my favorite artists ever released a tape-only album last year

still want to know who this is...

Scott Tuma

this one iirc

xpost

yah i guess, when iwas in america i had all my photos developed together at the end, 3 months worth, and im p clueless so only a fraction actually came out but yeah i mean digital is a totally diff experience there

― plax (ico), Thursday, March 17, 2011 10:53 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

I develop my own film so it's kinda involved, I wonder if there's an ILM thread yet about the process of listening to music, as opposed to the listening experience itself

omg esoj that tape's title is A+++

but I mean another thing (responding more to n/a's "it is nostalgia & only that" assertion) is that cassette releases can still be small. they are not in the cycle of promotion, generally speaking. if you put out an album on CD or even LP and people get excited about it, even at a small level, it starts getting blogged & posted & so on. cassettes do get ripped & shared & reviewed but at a much smaller level; tapes in 2011 sort of allow people & scenes to not participate as intensely in the Everything Gets A Press Release historical moment we're in. Tapes don't really have "release dates" and one-sheets as far as I know, they just sort of come into existence & Night People writes a little blurb about 'em and there are only a couple hundred and then they're gone, and if people go completely nuts about one then it gets pressed on an LP a year later, but tape releases get to retain a little don't-mind-us-we're-just-fucking-around vibe that other releases kind of can't claim. imo.

oh i was mixing up yr post with plax :(

haha its like youre not even reading my posts...

but tape releases get to retain a little don't-mind-us-we're-just-fucking-around vibe that other releases kind of can't claim

but yeah bon jovi otm - cassettes are just a really low risk way of releasing music atm. although i guess thats part of the nostalgic pull - appealing to the idea of music just being a thing for u & ur friends & sorta existing outside the constant flood of internet music

yeah Lamp is right - that is nostalgia I guess although I consider nostalgia a damning word: like, nostalgia to me is "it was better back then just by virtue of being back then." Whereas I think the connected world vs. the possibilities for isolation that're now extinct, that's an actual conflict worth talking about & fucking with

I take a lot of pleasure in thinking thru this stuff anyway thanks for this thread you guys good night

good night.

I miss the sound of a cassette, I especially one that has been well loved with grain noise in the blank track space. I had a copy of the Back to the Future soundtrack that had the wear noise, mostly from me playing it over and over in 6th grade on the bus ride to and from school. I also miss a lot of my old radio cassettes from when I'd spend the weekends taping songs from American Top 40 and a handful of the "retro" shows that would play rare 7" and 12" mixes of older singles. I've lost a lot of the tapes and have had to recreate them thanks to the intertubes.

I still own plenty of tapes (my car boasts a tape deck). My most played is a fab solo Wu tape my best friend compiled in '98, and it still sounds great -- the bass is especially fat.

but I mean another thing (responding more to n/a's "it is nostalgia & only that" assertion) is that cassette releases can still be small. they are not in the cycle of promotion, generally speaking. if you put out an album on CD or even LP and people get excited about it, even at a small level, it starts getting blogged & posted & so on. cassettes do get ripped & shared & reviewed but at a much smaller level; tapes in 2011 sort of allow people & scenes to not participate as intensely in the Everything Gets A Press Release historical moment we're in. Tapes don't really have "release dates" and one-sheets as far as I know, they just sort of come into existence & Night People writes a little blurb about 'em and there are only a couple hundred and then they're gone, and if people go completely nuts about one then it gets pressed on an LP a year later, but tape releases get to retain a little don't-mind-us-we're-just-fucking-around vibe that other releases kind of can't claim. imo.

― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, 17 March 2011 03:00 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I hear all this but it does beg the question, why not just put it out on CDR

except Lamp answered that right at the start of this revive

I buy a lot of tapes at the minute b/c lots of music I want to own is being released on the format but as far as I can tell its prevalence is entirely down to low-level marketing gimmicks, low-level trolling or some sort of combination thereof

get a tape deck they're cheap

not in my experience! mine died abt 3 years ago and I've been unable to find a replacement in what I consider a reasonable price range

(admittedly this may be my fault as the second-hand ones I've seen have had dents, stains, rusting and I don't trust those not to snap/warp my preciouses)

I bought a dual turntable off of craigslist and built a DIY line out thingy and hooked it up to my speakers and everything, and when I played my first LP on it (abandoned luncheonette from goodwill) it sounded like shit, so thin and scratchy

just checking - did yr "line out thingy" incorporate a phono preamp stage with RIAA curve equalisation? sry if teaching grandmother to suck eggs

why not just put it out on CDR

tapes can last a long time. cdrs dont.

not at all convinced that one of these formats is across-the-board more likely to deteriorate beyond playability than the other, based on my experience

just checking - did yr "line out thingy" incorporate a phono preamp stage with RIAA curve equalisation? sry if teaching grandmother to suck eggs

― dimension hatris (a passing spacecadet), 2011年03月17日 星期四 下午5:33 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I build the thing here, can't remember what I did with the signal after the pre-amp...maybe fed it into a receiver? Sony? maybe I should try a proper poweramp.

http://www.hagtech.com/bugle.html

oh, well I've never seen/heard that kit preamp but in theory it should have been fine, so no idea. just checking since plugging a phono-level output straight into line in will indeed sound thin and scratchy and generally ass-like in the extreme. it seemed pretty unlikely, but!

has anyone used one of those ION tape-to-mp3 devices? I was always pretty skeptical like "why would I buy this plasticky do-it-for-you thing when I can just plug a real cassette deck into my good soundcard and set the levels myself and actually know what it's doing", but since I'm finding it hard to buy a real, good cassette deck for even twice the price...

man, you guys are all so weird! i can't understand how scientific everything's become when it comes to how we receive whatever it is we're consuming. it's like there was a huge shark-jump ten years ago, probably after vhs frazzled away. there are so many factors that contribute to how you receive something, and there's still this weird attempt to try to compile hierarchies based on the mathematics involved; something has the highest pixel ratio and is thus the most enjoyable presentation of something. with movies, the way they're presented, and the fidelity to the original source material, sure it can be important, but other times your experience can be as affected by like, are you sitting comfortably? are you tired? you aren't always sat there wishing that the female romantic lead's face was rendered better, and situations in which it was don't necessarily boost your understanding of a thing. the idea that we can plot a line-graph of ENJOYMENT, correlating with SCREEN RESOLUTION, for sex and the city ii, is nuts. and with music, maybe everyone goes home and sits in living rooms carefully arranged so as to minimise impedence and listens to a SACD of kind of blue from their sweet stereo and it's ideal, but similarly maybe they don't; maybe the first time you heard it and the first time it pricked up your ears was when you were clunking a walkman around, or someone gave you a copy of it on a cassette and you could hear parts of the other side playing backwards during the silent parts, but still you're pretty sure there was some trumpet playing throughout and it was pretty moving. i don't say this in favour of nostalgia - remember when!, you were so young!, lol @ walkmans! - but in favour of the fact that we don't listen so mechanically, and the time we heard something in a car might have been better than at home, the time we danced to something blaring out of a shitty speaker had the edge on the time we bought the LP, and the time we spend listening to the radio in the kitchen sometimes beats our attentive quiet-time with headphones. tapes are nice objects, and do sound good; they have a different sound; kind of particularly, but not fetishistically, the kind that have given up some of their potential crisp fidelity in favour of a blocky, clunky, overloading fullness. to put out tapes now: why the fuck not? if you don't have a tape player then - you are kind of a musical judas tbh, but anyway - fine, don't buy one, you probably realistically have options in terms of getting this music; or go buy a boombox (because why wouldn't you? do they not receive the radio? is the FM radio news vaguer and more profane than digital radio news, or is it just that if you don't get your shit together and put your aerial in the right spot, it could crackle? (like a digital radio could gurgle (we blank out the flaws of new things))). they still play the songs out and that is kind of the point. it isn't that i have never had the experience of hearing a thing - autumn's child, on good headphones - and appreciating what good representation can do for a piece of art; of course i have, and of course that's worth pursuing, and preserving, i guess. but similarly i can't forget about the fact that it is all just music, and for all our qualms over how to receive it, a $3 shittily-mastered BILLIE HOLIDAY HITS compilation from a service station still has a whole lot of billie holiday songs on.

all of this is different from tape releases; maybe they're fetishistic or ironic or whatever. but they're still giving you music and you're still playing it in your house and that is the point. i'm not even getting into the virtues of tapes themselves, vs cds (you get two track ones, and two final songs!, vs one track one and one final song), terrible & lifeless objects that cds are. but it's fine to just sell a thing or buy a thing, free of the weird sense that we should be pursuing it to its platonic ideal of listenability.

Case in point:

In a Sherlock holmes story, the detective retires to his drawing room to play the violin a bit.

Meanwhile, the two 'villains' are left alone in his dining room, and discuss in whispers the entire details of their crime and guilt.

At which point the detective appears from behind the curtain, having heard the whole thing AHA!!

But.. you were playing the violin in there! How?

They all go into the other room, and lo there is a windy up gramophone playing the music off a new 78rpm record.

Now, you might think that it was unlikely that they'd mistake a real performance for something off a 78rpm record through a funnel.

But that's the only format they know: Live performance. So, this new-fangled invention at this point would seem to be "as good as live"...

I remember spending gobs of money on those TDK metal tapes, only to use them to record my vinyl blaring from shitty speakers. The irony.

"not at all convinced that one of these formats is across-the-board more likely to deteriorate beyond playability than the other, based on my experience"

i have tapes that are 20+ years old and they play fine. i have had plenty of cdrs that never lasted more than a year or two.

99% of the tapes i play all play fine no matter how old they are. if they are DIRTY then that is a different story. cuz most people treated their tapes like they treat their cds. like garbage. don't put them in the case, left on the floor of a car, etc.

i make tape mixes all the time and if i played one for you you would not be able to tell the difference from a cd as far as sound quality goes.

only the pungent smell of nostalgia, and scott's fixed, faraway gaze would tip you off that it was a cassette playing, triggering a montage of memories from long ago, the medium itself the message of memories.

schlump that is a good post - but I dunno if I buy your analogy to consuming movies

I feel like there are certain ways in which the consumption of music and the consumption of movies differ so that we can't draw a one to one analogy. for one, we listen to music repeatedly

any of you guys still play VHS?

I do.

Classic: That be-doo-doo-DOo-YEEP sound before and after most cassette albums released by Capitol in the eighties.

XDR !

wasn't it supposed to prove that the quality was higher and demonstrate the range of sonics ?

have a memory that The Dandy Warhols open one of their earlier albums with that noise.

y'huh; some things you can only get on vhs, or only easily get on vhs, or they come to you on vhs, etc. maybe watching a crackly video is a vivid example of dealing with the relative shortcomings of a format, but i think that limited aspect of watching a film - it's crackly, or whatever - is pretty minor, and again has to sit next to other considerations. i'm probably way more bummed out that what i'm watching on VHS has commercials, because it's taped off tv ten years ago, etc, than that there's some flickering at the bottom of the picture.

i think i am extra-pro-tapes, here, because i'm aware how ridiculous these arguments can get, how ridiculous my attempts at judging these things usually are; sticking to music, i will rep pretty hard for vinyl over anything else - i think it somehow 'projects' better, is 'fuller', sounds more like real instruments, and all sorts of other nebulous praises. but while i sit at home, really pleased to be playing something on record on my crappy second hand stereo, there are other people who are listening to a CD in their ridiculous music den, each constituent part connected with well-insulated components, music booming out of five speakers, and having a way better sounding experience. it's weird to be so locked into the statistics of the format thing when there are all of these other variables floating around, because it's only in that sense of mathematic comparison - 1600 vs 800, 'running groove' vs binary dots, etc - that we can really, objectively 'compare'. it doesn't take into account that we are hearing stuff, not somehow processing it. maybe you reach a point where it's legitimate to compare, and maybe it is those people who are already there who are voicing concerns about the insufficiency of tapes.

going back to video (sorry!, dayo, i totally get that & can appreciate that how a thing is conveyed is more significant if it's going round and round), it reminds me of digital vs analogue arguments. i would take the zapruder film, or technicolour film stock production cf midnight cowboy, over anything contemporary. it has a transformative power and it renders light beautifully and there's the weird mechanics of it being made by light burned onto material. but that is old & superseded technology and its emotional impact isn't factored into its statistical analysis.

I'm totally with you on the video front there schlump! and there are certain types of sound and genres of music which definitely do sound better through lo-fi equipment. I guess on the sound front I am biased towards hi-fidelity reproduction though, since I mainly listen to R&B and hip hop and contemporary pop and other genres which are mastered to increasingly sound better as you ramp up the equipment.

I think one thing I would like to do, is to find a friend who has a really good vinyl setup, and go to their house, and sit down and listen to his setup like I am the maxell man.

people still swear by betamax. or at least that guy at sony who just died never got over the use of vhs over beta.

i, personally, have never heard more amazing sound than the brief time that i had a laserdisc player in the 90's. suspiria soundtrack on laserdisc with huge speaker system ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, so amazing.

momentarily confused there because what r&b & cassettes have in common is maxwell

but yeah!, i guess you should check out someone's system. do you still have the turntables you bought & everything? if they're just sat there, and all. all of this is maybe just a recipe for becoming a vinyl geek and then getting really bummed out that shit doesn't come out on wax anymore, btw.

Xpost. Yup, first Dandy Warhols album does that. Still think that one is pretty great, and remain amazed that they were ever more than a WFMU favorite (even though I listen to some of the later albums on occasion). In some alternate reality, they opened for The Kiss Offs/Black Lipstick.

I think that 'bleep' was an instruction to the cutting mechanism to stop spinning tape into the cassette shell and seal the cut end into the other spool.

^ a translation is available for younger readers

I remember being in the music dept of WHSmiths in high Street Kensington, where a very confused and lost old German couple needed help.

Thanks to my rudimentary german, I was able to explain that where they were standing was not a shop filled with lots and lots of brightly decorated packs of playing cards, but "musikassetten!"

and directed them to the games dept.

(That was an xpost, funnily enough)

That Ralf and Florian eh? What are they like!

people still swear by betamax. or at least that guy at sony who just died never got over the use of vhs over beta.

I think my dad is STILL pissed about vhs winning this one! he was griping about how better blade runner looked on beta for a not insignificant portion of my childhood.

I love how the criterion videodrome dvd comes in a case that looks like a beta tape.

http://www.planete-hd.com/web/images/divers_sup_tests/videodrome_criterion_vhs_cover.jpg

aha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_(audio)

Recording a short test toneburst at the beginning and end of the program material on the cassette, to detect for any loss of audio frequencies in the audio spectrum. The toneburst consists of 11 tones about .127 seconds in length (with .023 seconds of silence in-between each tone), from 32 to 18,000 Hz. These tones are recorded on the cassette, and are read during the duplication process to detect if there is any loss of any audio information.[4]

seem to recall this being mentioned somewhere on my Flat Earth cassette - which sounded like shit, as the bass distorted. replaced it for a different cassette copy, and that was the same.

so i believe i never bought another XDR marked tape after that.

i always thought the tone was to tell auto-reverse players to flip over before hitting the end of the side to reduce tape wear

I Love Tapes

we have a combo CD/cassette radio in our main car so I've been listening to mainly tapes while driving around. kept most of my tapes from back in the day so i've been having lots of fun revisiting albums I had ignored for years. I've found that buying used tapes from thrift stores is a total crap-shoot since, like Scott said, most people didn't think you had to take care of them, so I have a handy cleaning cassette in the glove box for when the heads get all gunked up.

I still play VHS tapes too (never throw media away, huge collection). got back into it a couple years ago and had trouble playing alot of them - wavy lines, stuttering, sound cutting out. almost believed the stories from pro 'digitize your VHS' sites that tape disintegrates after X years and was thinking of finally tossing them out, then found a tutorial on how you can manually clean the head drum (http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/ - how to repair anything). Carefully followed the steps and voila!, tapes look great again, even old SLP shit from the TV (i have a box of 6 hour tapes of random cut-ups from 88-92 as sample fodder, lots of preachers, Geraldo and Morton Downey Jr. lol)

I have a big box of old mix-tapes, sometimes pick one at random for the journey...

Which is why I'd get people asking why A&A were singing "I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, and I'll punch the man who says I'm not.." back in the day.

herb, you don't have a reel to reel do you? got all these cool tapes i kinda wanna hear before i sell them to japan. bitches brew on reel to reel!

wish I did...my very first recorder as a kid was my parents' portable reel-to-reel w/ a built-in speaker. remember making little 'radio plays' and recording monster movies off tv.

remember making little 'radio plays'

I did this. The only one I can remember was a Sherlock Holmes, or Sherlock Holmes inspired one - set in Limehouse in London, I think I just liked that word, Limehouse.

i still have a book of K-Mart cassettes from a few years later, one is the epic 'Detroit Rock City' w/ me playing all four members of KISS

herb, i need to call you. i might need help with records. picking up a big load on sunday the 27th. how's your back? it IS world theatre day that sunday, so you might have plans... (i can give you many many many records in return for the favor)

no pressure though...

sounds like a total blast, I'll bring the vicodin

mmmm, now yer speaking my language. i'm gonna ask tattooed love boy S.G. if he wants to come too. so it would be me, you, S, and Maria. and we would get some help on the other end. could be close to 8k or more records. and i probably won't need 2 or 3k of those. so you will have plenty to feed on before i call in my local hoarders who will take care of the rest for me.

herb, you don't have a reel to reel do you? got all these cool tapes i kinda wanna hear before i sell them to japan. bitches brew on reel to reel!

may not be timely enough if you need to ship your reels, but there are TONS of reel to reel players on ebay for dirt cheap.

or there were a few years ago anyway

if anybody owns the bonus tape of blank unstaring heirs of doom pls webmail me. peace.

― plax (ico), Wednesday, March 16, 2011 10:10 PM (Yesterday)

now you have me intrigued. if you know your way around torrent programs (I don't), you may be able to download it via this Russian site.

(it's listed there as "Blank Unstaring Heirs Of Doom (2006) EP")

ok, never mind the torrent thing: I found it somewhere else. check your webmail :)

i love you

bought my first cassette in prolly 20 years and it arrived today (gonna play it soon)!: Zoom Zoom - the best of Louis Prima.
i enjoy being a Luddite of sorts

http://www.tonepublications.com/old-school/nakamichi-dragon/

A number of non-audiophile friends couldn’t believe I was listening to a lowly cassette, and a pre-recorded one at that. Our resident HMEC (human musical encyclopedia & collector) Tom Casselli sent me a MoFi recording of Dark Side of the Moon. “Dude, if you have a Dragon, you should be the keeper of this tape.” Yeah, it was cool and now the hunt for a few more MoFi cassettes is on.

good read! that's such a cool machine...

Today’s haul:
Toto IV
Pointer Sisters Break Out
Little Feat Waiting For Columbus