Even if I did grow up around tapes and LPs, I only made it to about 11-years-old before CDs took over completely. Those first tapes that I had at that tender age – I’m not afraid to admit – were mostly Queen and The Beatles. So rather than tripping down some mis-exploration of cassette history, it makes more sense to explore here a few uses of cassettes as a medium today. It’s not, of course, just needless revivalism that makes tapes relevant in the blog age: many musicians are exploring these fuzzy plastic artifacts in new and wide-eyed ways. It feels particularly relevant to me, having missed the time when a Talking Heads tape might circulate the whole block before making its way out of your boom box speakers.
There are many new cassettes by DIY artists who work to re-imagine this sort of missed memory. New Jersey’s Matthew Mondanile plays as Ducktails, a pop project which is mostly all cassette-released and drenched in a warm, analogue drone. There is an amazingly realized aesthetic running through this stuff with all its plastic nostalgia reminiscent of Ninja Turtles pizza, fake palm trees and sugary cereal. There’ a lo-fi tape fuzz and reassuring quality here that also permeates his other projects, Predator Vision, Real Estate and Dreams In Vision Field.
These home recordings have some of the comfiest feelings you’ll find, reminiscent of Ariel Pink but with an explorative nudge that is hard to pin down. That odd and slightly skewed element of the homely is something that interests Matthew, describing his own music in an interview as having a “real fake sort of nostalgia”. His songs have a weird plasticy sort of nostalgia, like something you’d get from watching The Wonder Years; half-real memories creeping through.
“It’s like trying to imagine that [past]through the music, but not actually being there, so it’s like making an imaginary place.” Mondanile says, “That’s kind of what I’m trying to do because I really like the idea of feel good music. But at the same time it’s not really real – it’s synthetic or fake – a fake recreation of something. That’s kind of convoluted but I’m glad that you understand [about the]fake nostalgia, because that’s exactly where I’m coming from. And I don’t try to do that so consciously, I try to have a more unconscious action to what I’m doing, like not really focusing on it that much, a pretty easy going kind of thing.”
The innocent melodies and sense of comfort that comes through Ducktails’ tunes is certainly amplified by the medium of cassette. He’s released plenty of them now, all of which are available through his own label Future Sound which has a visual aesthetic that crosses over with his music, filled as it is with Echo The Dolphin aquas, blues and washy imagery. Buried between tape fuzz, creaks of his parent’s basement and outdoor sounds (he records outside sometimes too), are pop songs unfolding from drone pieces, the latter of which is very much his background.
“I only record on cassette. Ducktails started with a cassette because I was listening to a lot of music on cassette. I was living in Berlin and I became friends with James Ferraro from Skaters. I would hang out with them and they were constantly working on cassettes and putting them out almost daily. It seemed like they were doing it so fast. I was really into the production aspect of it, and they were telling me not to wait for anyone else to put out your music, and that it’s better just to do it yourself. So as soon as I got back to America I literally just recorded all this stuff in a day and that’s how the first Ducktails release came about. I put it out the next day after dubbing it to some cassettes.
“It was so simple because I didn’t have to deal with a computer or anything,”†He continues, “All I had to do was use cassette dubbers. It was a real awakening for me because I like the idea of everything being as raw sounding as possible with nothing covering up the sound. The only thing covering [the sound]might be the quality of the recording. The cassette is a really easy way to help me get my music out there and it’s also more of an object than a CD – I don’t think people necessarily always listen to cassettes but I do think that people will always want them.”
Tapes are infinitely richer objects of cultural capital nowadays but it’s pretty perverse to see a Wavves tape going for $77USD (and rising!) on eBay, or any obscure noise cassette featuring Thurston Moore or Kevin Shields going for a huge amount. It’s certainly not just the music that those bidders will be in pursuit of (though that fifteen minutes of trebly free-noise courtesy of Shields may be worth checking out) it’s more the combined rarity, obscurity and general awesomeness of their physicality. It’s a media that suits the margins of musical culture with its anti-industry baggage and guerilla ways of distributing culture, though it’s also at odds with that sort of crazed eBay completism, which seems to displace the original – and more important – goal of sustaining oblique and alternative ideas.
This mystique can increase the general appeal of sounds, especially those found in the usually fifteen-minute improv efforts of many musicians. Cleveland three-piece Emeralds, one of the biggest drone bands in the US right now (building up a huge reputation with last year’s Solar Bridge LP and their gigantic underdog performance at No Fun fest in New York) have amassed a massive tapeography as well as dozens of solo releases. Talking to guitarist Mark McGuire (who I’d chatted to on the phone for an interview a few weeks prior) after the show, I remember it felt almost odd when he handed me one of his solo cassettes: it felt really nice, a very human, very real, and very physical gesture. That might sound a little overwrought but it was a rare gesture, which is part of why getting an actual mixtape in the mail tends to feel more substantial.
Gathering from the material on that solo tape, listening to Emeralds’ other releases, talking to Emeralds fans and speaking to the members of the group, it becomes clear that the main way people hear this stuff is through a computer. What I hadn’t thought about with this already much altered context, is that often the mp3s will be copies of copies of copies and thus will have lost a lot of quality. Mark gets slightly peeved about that factor, though does enjoy that altered context and its possibilities.
“Especially with the way a lot of our stuff sounds, even through different tape decks it can kind of vary the experience of listening to the music a lot. It’s pretty cool. The only time I really mind is if someone hasn’t heard the original recording and they hear this rip that’s not as good quality, then maybe they’ll think we really suck or something like that.” He laughs. “But yeah, I love the ambience of tape hiss and having our stuff on a format that is gonna have that [quality]no matter what, unless we get them professionally dubbed or mastered or whatever. It’s a lot of fun to work with. When you can set aside something purely as a tape, I think they can be more powerful than even a full length LP because of the way it’s given out and the way it’s conceived by the artist, and how tapes are normally more a brief glimpse at a time and place of an artist.”
I believed that cassettes were more easily damaged than CDRs or actual albums, but I’m mostly basing that on the hugely sunburned Broken Social Scene tape that I had dubbed via my computer and was forced to listen to in my car over and over, or the old Roxy Music Best Of that belonged to my Mum that made Bryan Ferry sound like a mutant from another planet, or as if his voice was immersed in a pond. Perhaps cassettes are more durable and heavy duty in their old world clunkiness though, or at least age better than CDs which, if scratched, become massively annoying rather than becoming filled with weird sonic tics. It’s a process of decay that definitely lends itself to the grandeur of Emeralds.
“I feel like they’re really durable. When CD-Rs came out I would burn lots of stuff to CD but when you get one small scratch on it, it’s history – you can’t even listen to it. But with cassettes, if the tape messes up for a split second and something fades out and comes back in, it’s still how the tape sounds itself, it sounds a lot cooler.”
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as understood by theorist Richard Rorty, is useful in discerning the accidental from the deliberate in terms of musicians’ use of the cassette medium. How aware are these musicians of the malleability of those bits of plastic? Quite a bit, it seems: Emeralds are certainly masters at it. If, as Rorty says, the term “‘deconstruction’ refers in the first instance to the way in which the ‘accidental’ features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly ‘essential’ message”, recording to tape fits here in many ways. Those accidental features of a tape – fuzz, blending, scratching, portability, sharing, mass duplication, sun damage – give this music a quality not always intentionally constructed by the creator, though the very act of recording on to a tape suggests an inherent knowledge of these features. Is a tape more personal if it has travelled with you across the desert, if you leave it out in the sun and it still plays? What if it has accidentally captured the taste of the dust and the feeling of dry heat on the arm that you lean out the window when driving? Of course it does, and luckily, many artists are capturing that feeling right onto cassettes.
That dusty mysteriousness is probably even better discovered in the works of James Ferraro of US improv/drone band Skaters, whose cassette catalogue is staggering in size. What’s more amazing still about his stuff is the fact that all his new age soundscapes and purple, semi-opaque textures are all crafted from scratch. The only samples Ferraro uses are the odd Beavis and Butthead ones swiped from TV; all others come naturally and they frequently blow the mind with their unknown and mythical origins. Check Last American Hero/Adrenaline’s End, which sounds almost like Ferraro has found an unmarked tape at the bottom of a thrift store bin and looped it for 15 minutes, building a blissed and imaginary piece of harsh drone that genuinely changes the feel of a room. It’s littered with mutant chunks of American culture. They’re the sort of sounds that strive for a weird and distinct kind of transcendence that feel innately distant enough already, without the tape being warped and worn.
Apologies for the pop culture theorem, but another studier of Derrida, J Hillis Miller, provides some colour to the idea of tapes as a deconstructed medium/media: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text,” He says, “but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is not rock but thin air.”
If deconstructionism is a declaration that meaning is finally indeterminate and the “logo” is indefinable, then the culture of releasing craploads of tapes ala Ferraro fits into the ambiguity of meaning and identity in a significant way. The ambiguity of a back catalogue of tapes which are by nature transitory defines the lack of a permanent structure of meaning and definite identity combated by Derrida and other deconstructionists. They are subversive, for sure, and definitely anti-music industry, at least by major label standards.
I’m possibility (okay, definitely) guilty of this, but if the cassette is today a medium that is the antithesis of the computer, it’s interesting that the easiest way to hear and find out about the most tape-fuzzy of musicians is still through MySpace and blogs. Almost all the “cassettes” I’ve heard/possess are coming out of my shiny white MacBook. It’s problematic, like Emeralds said earlier in this piece, but in terms of recording I was under the impression that these days it was much easier to lay down tunes to a computer and share them via the internet. Anyone can download a pirated version of Ableton, Reason or Logic, as was demonstrated when Portland electronic musician YACHT recently copped shit for admitting his copies of said programs were “stolen” from the internet.
Computers do not suit a lot of musical visions, but at the same time you can virtually replicate, to an extent, any analogue sounds with programs like those. Ducktails’ Matthew Mondanile records straight to tape out of both ease and aesthetics but it’s probably fair to lay some criticism down to the use of lo-fi and the cassette as something of an excuse for lazy vision or a lack of musicality.
Not that this is always a bad thing, but there is a common attitude that this trend of ‘no-wave/no-fi’ artists are, despite their scruffy textures and cool aesthetics, more one-dimensional than genuinely experimental, that the cassette is more a tool of grey noise than a useful musical character or instrument. Analogue vibes are nice, it’s true, and it seems like a lot of these are coming out of Los Angeles right now, particularly from the label Not Not Fun, who has recently put out particularly hot sauce from Abe Vigoda (owning tropical-punk hit Skeleton on tape? Yes please!), mutated 70s funk from Vibes, dark and mysterious tape drone by Robedoor and also Brisbane’s own Blank Realm.
In terms of computers though, the parallels between blogs and cassette tapes are interesting in that they’re both ways of sharing, and both offer varying degrees of instant gratification. Both also sit in the margins of culture; the guru-like status of a music blogger now surpasses that of the perpetually unimpressed record store dude and likewise the reach and influence of their opinion has a wider forum to resonate (ie everywhere).
I guess that’s how the tape is important: in re-instilling the need for the ‘object’s in music (as if it ever went away). There’s some backlash against the significance of this: some people argue that the cassette is truly dead and currently used purely for the sake of ‘cool’. But I guess that makes it even more important as an artifact that is ‘dead’ to the commercial music industry.
Overall, it’s an essential and generally nice way for noise/drone musicians who work on an improvised basis to document small and monumental steps they’re making each time they jam. I’m infinitely glad to be able to hear those short bursts of improvised inspiration, whether it’s secondhand via MacBook, burnt by sun in the car, or even brand new through the stereo.
Ducktails’ cassettes are available through Future Sound. Emeralds new album ‘What Happened’ is available through No Fun Records.
