Thoughts on microcassettes, Dictaphonia,
and those nasty mean little tapes
Back in the 1980s I was one of the people who spearheaded the original wave of
interest in cassettes as a legitimate audio art form and format. The
Golden Age of Cassette Culture! And this wasn't just people doing mix tapes.
These were fully-realized experimental music audioworks, with a highly
personal and idiosyncratic feeling and sound to them, and often with
homemade packaging. In the mid-80s I operated with Debbie Jaffe the Cause And
Effect Distributon Service and label and in three years we sold and traded
5,000+ cassettes of homemade experimental music from all over Planet Earth. You
can see a list of my own early stuff from the 80s plus even download many of
those original cassette albums here:
http://www.halmcgee .com/Music/
I released all of my work on cassette up until about 1998. From about 2000
until roughly 2005-6 I released all of my new experimental music on CDRs and a
few CD releases.
>From about 2006 onward I stopped releasing my music in physical formats
(tapes, discs) and released all of my stuff online on my web site,
halmcgee.com. Online music was to me the perfect and logical extension of
what we were doing with our homemade cassette releases back in the 80s. Open
access democratic anarchy. Anybody with a computer and an internet connection
had free access to my music. I have generally in recent years offered all of my
music for free. My downloads have always been free.
A couple of years ago I encountered a lot of resistance to and downright
hostility toward online music in discussions on the Noise discussion boards.
There were endless and highly-detailed complaints about the shitty sound
quality of mp3s and about how online music wasn't genuine enough. Many people
still wanted to have a physical object to hold in their hands with printed
artwork, something tangible and "real". People 20-30 years younger than me were
resisting what I saw as natural "progress" - online music and were, in my
mind, regressing somewhat by insisting on physical container audio formats.
Hence, the renewed interest in cassettes, as your study suggests. I think that
it was natural for me and people of my age group to pass through the stages
that I did, because we started making our homemade music at a time that was
pre-computer, pre-internet, pre-email, pre-MySpace and pre-Facebook. We
handwrote letters, dubbed tapes, went to Kinko's and printed tape covers,
packaged up the tapes, went to the post office and mailed them, etc. For people
much younger than me, whose lives have essentially always been mediated by
digital culture... I think that they are looking for authenticity, for genuine
experiences, and in some ways I think they see online anything as drudgery, as
work-related, as something that doesn't connect them to other people, but as
something that is distancing and cold.
I must say, that as much as admire the general spirit of today's cassette
resurgence, I also take a dim view of it. To me it's like reaching for
something that isn't really there any more. And much of what I see in
today's cassette labels is a sort of preciousness, a fetishistic clinging to
physical objects almost as if they are totemic magical devices. Many of
these labels produce their releases in ridiculously limited editions, which
just increases the fetishism.
So why did I start a microcassette label? There are many reasons.
You can actually interact with a cassette, change it, erase the original
contents, insert your own content. Aside from scratching and altering a
vinyl record there's not a whole lot that you can do with a vinyl record.
There's an essential difference here.
I know about all of the work that's been done by turntablists, locked-groove
people, Christian Marclay, Milan Kníák, etc., but a vinyl record is
basically non-interactive. It's meant for listening to, being an audience to
what someone else has done. The same with CDs and CDRs, which are worse and
more boring from an artistic standpoint than vinyl.
Like I said above, a cassette, standard or micro-, offers/invites
interaction and open-ended creation. It's an empty container that awaits
you, me, anybody, everybody. It breaks down the false barrier between artist
and audience. Everyone can be an artist.
Why did I choose to release microcassettes? Lots of reasons.
Let's start with a basic one.
I think they sound great. They have a limited frequency response, usually
about 400 Hz to 4000 Hz, which by design, matches the range of the human voice.
So, they seem very human to me in their sound. The sound is
hyper-compressed, and if one doesn't clutter the tape with too many sounds at
once it can have a startling clarity and directness. The sound on a
microcassette is very focused. It is what it is, right there, there it is.
Also, they are monophonic - no bothering with stereo sound! - who needs it?
Here's something else. The microcassette was
