Transitory Magnetism
 Bill Hutson

 
Having nothing to review yet, I have decided to begin this column with a little love letter to cassette tapes.  The purpose of this website is to celebrate this unique format, but why us, and why now? As I see it, there are several aspects of contemporary music culture that can be investigated using, as a possible means of explanation, the profusion of cassettes during my generation’s upbringing.  Those of us in our twenties, and perhaps early thirties, grew up in a particularly unique time with regard to music and to the physical medium through which we experienced it.  We are a very small generation of people whose first relationship to music was with compact cassettes.  We were too young for vinyl; most of our parents, I’m sure, had some records lying around, left over from their college days, but they were only ever dragged out for the purposes of nostalgia, and we never really participated in that.  On the other side, compact discs didn’t show up until most of us were in junior high.  If you ask a person in his twenties what the first album he bought was, whatever he answers, it will almost certainly have been on cassette tape.  (For the curious— i.e.: nobody, my first tape was Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain.)  The important thing is, though: based on this connection to cassettes, specific characteristics of the medium have shaped the way this generation thinks about making and consuming music.

Firstly: when you bought a tape, the music was yours in a way that music on vinyl had never been.  The moment commercial tapes were available, so were blank ones.  You could dub near-perfect copies for everyone you knew.  You had purchased more than a physical object, you had purchased the content and the right (though not necessarily the legal right) to reproduce it.  We often forget that with all of the nonsense about digital music rights these days, record companies already lost this battle twenty years ago.  With this innovation, amazing phenomena like the mixtape were born.  My sister, who is older than I am, would make tapes of all the cool music she liked and give them to me so that I could impress my little elementary school friends-- I had a c90 with Pretty Hate Machine on the A side, and Bleach on the B side.  I had a tape of REM’s Document and Green where the tracks were interlaced, one from one album, then the next from the other.  Screw Michael Stipe’s artistic vision.  We could reprogram it for our own purposes—we bought it!  You could make your own greatest hits tape of your favorite band, or re-dub all the Beatles albums without the shitty Paul McCartney songs.  It was your music.  This phenomenon was as influential to plunderphonic (if anybody still uses that word) and sampling music as hip hop DJ culture was.  Making tapes was how most people our age learned about sampling and recording music.

Blank cassettes existed for people to put their own audio on.  Home recording became available to stoned kids in their bedrooms.  Who among us didn’t record their first experiments onto cassette tapes? (My sister taped me at age four reciting the lyrics to Run DMC’s “You
Be Illin’”).  The ease of tapes compared to earlier recording alternatives, combined with the fact that you were making something that, for all intents and purposes, looked just like that fresh Public Enemy tape you bought from the Warehouse made the whole process so much more exciting.  So many people enjoy noise and other experimental musics because they discovered it by fucking around with cassette recorders (for nobody but themselves) and then later figured out that there are people in the world who do the same thing, only well.  Also: the sound of cassettes had to have been influential. The poor fidelity of dubbed tapes is an aesthetic hallmark for DIY music.  "Lo-fi," as a genre tag, means: “ pretty quiet and buried in
tape hiss.”  Rather than being a necessary evil, or extra-musical content, hiss and tape distortion can be an artistic choice, an emblem of something other than an undesirable budget.  In fact, the specific type of audio degradation found on cassettes informs the sound of countless contemporary noise heroes.  (And rock stars, really — where would Bill Callahan be if it weren’t for fuzzy tapes?)

Of course, many factors contribute to these aesthetic and cultural concerns— without cassettes, there’d still be an underground music scene.  It is, however, important that cassettes are still valued within that scene, for reasons other than nostalgia and kitsch, as opposed to the way that, say, eight tracks are thought of.  Far from being obsolete, the tape is another valid medium, with its own individual strengths and, when produced well, should be considered on the level of vinyl and digital audio.

Until I have tapes to review that aren’t just things I got from my friends, I’ll close with a list of recent recommended releases.

Evenings – Descending Coma (Monorail Trespassing, c34)
Emaciator – Habit (Rundownsun, c20)
S.K.I. M.A.S.K. –  (The Comic Beyond, c45)
Unicorn Hard-on – Feathers and Flight (Triple Rainbow, c40)