The title of this book is so perfect that I’m shocked it hasn’t been done before. The explanation of it works well, too. As Masters writes, “In the technical lingo of cassette, ‘high bias’ means high quality. The higher the bias, the better the sound. The story of the cassette tape has bias, too. Every person who encounters a tape adds something to that story, whether by listening to it, recording over it, or passing it on” (p. 4). So, right from the jump, you know you’re taking a trip through the world of the varied uses of compact cassette tapes all around the world. It’s not just limited to a celebration of the aesthetics of heartfelt, hand-written j-cards on deeply personal mixtapes exchanged between friends and lovers. As far as historical treatments of musical formats, it’s much more accessible than Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format.
That said, the third chapter, which is about the long history of international musicians and labels who use tapes as sonic art, is a mess of names, locations, labels, and bands that is hard to follow. It’s like a verbal version of the disorientation of a tape that is decaying and falling apart in your cassette deck. I had trouble making any sense of it really. It seems so purposely disorienting, but that seems like the point—using a cassette to make music is going to result in a lot of time-consuming confusion. So maybe the chapter does work…
When Masters slows down a bit to reflect on the implications of the cassette tape as a means of sharing music, his insights truly shine. As he explains, “Cassettes can offer a way to avoid corporate streaming services, whose offer of listener freedom is a bit of a mirage, considering the algorithms that push them toward specific artists, gather their personal data, and subject them to advertisements. Cassettes can also provide a more intimate way to share music with others. Giving someone a handmade mixtape is surely more personal than sharing a playlist, whose creation is more akin to data entry and which is usually accessible only through paying for subscriptions or enduring ads” (p. 156). Shortly thereafter, Dave Doyen from the Tabs Out podcast quips “It’s hard to make a CD-R not remind you of Staples or OfficeMax” (p. 165). It’s also hard to argue with their positions. I took the time to listen to a few tapes friends had made me over the years while I was reading the book, and I was surprised at how strongly the music was able to bring me back to where I was when I first heard it. The same goes for the tape I made for myself that has 16 different versions of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on a 60-minute tape—yeesh. I really don’t have the same emotional imprint with playlists or links friends have shared with me, so it only makes sense that having a unique physical artifact that contains the music will be more powerful than a list of letters and numbers in a URL.
Now, forget everything I wrote in the preceding paragraph and follow these links to access a rip of a cassette I made in 2004 that is nothing but metal riffs (almost no vocals at all) ripped straight from my records, CDs, and tapes. (Side A and Side B) I confess that I used a MiniDisc (where’s the book on that device?) to capture and sequence the riffs, but the way I shared it with my friends was through repeated dubbing of tapes in my bedroom. Early in the lockdowns of 2020, one of the dudes from Negative Insight zine created a Web site dedicated to reminiscences about and postings of old mix tapes and I was lucky enough to be written up on his insta and the site itself. Both are now gone, but, luckily for you, the SoundCloud still exists.
Friends who received that tape tried to make their own with using cassettes, but they couldn’t get the instantaneous transitions to work. You’d think pressing pause on a cassette would work just fine, but it wasn’t close enough as the digital precision of the MiniDisc format. Listening back to it now, on the MZ-R55 itself, I recall the split-second reflexes it took to stop and start the recordings at just the right moment, and then the further splicing of the captured sounds, all on a display about the size of a postage stamp. Obsessed barely begins to describe that level of intensity. I can’t imagine conjuring it now.
While I was going through my MiniDiscs this weekend, I was delighted to find that I’d made an attempt at another riff tape. I made about 30 minutes of recordings but had not sequenced them yet. That sequencing is also a crucial part of the process of making the riff tape. Had I used only cassettes, I would have had to switch each album, tape, or disc at just the right moment. Instead, using a MiniDisc allowed me to be listening to an album, think “man, I’ve always loved that riff,” and then run it back and record it for later. I eventually made pages of notes on the sequence I wanted the riffs to take for the final tape. Then began the laborious process of editing the order of the riffs so that it flowed the way I wanted. There are intro parts, main riffs, transitions, bridges, secondary riffs, drum fills, breakdowns, solos, outros, and everything else that goes into a song. All told there are close to 100 different riffs on each side of the tape. The longest is the “Hell Awaits” intro, which is over two minutes. The shortest are from songs I can no longer place and only last for a second or two at most. I no longer own many of these records, having sold about half of my record collection when moving states about eight years ago. I know I could just Shazam the riffs to find out where they are from, but it’s also more fun to think of these two sides of tape as a unique composition from my past self.
A few years later, the band I was in at the time had a show coming up at a bar with a real sound system. This was unusual for us, being a DIY hardcore punk band that usually played basements, so the idea of recording our set and our new songs for posterity made sense. I was able to plug the MiniDisc into the soundboard and capture our set from that night. Our band put the live recording out as a self-released cassette. I hand-dubbed 42 copies of the recording onto 90-minute Maxell tapes later that month. I’d forgotten that I’d recorded the BLACK DOVE set from that night as well. So, I ripped that to my computer this weekend.
It’s clear that MiniDisc as a format was a significant, though inconsistent, part of my music-listening life (and I didn’t even mention using it to rip MP3s from my computer or sample audio from television or VHS tapes for mixes). I don’t know enough about how others have used it to say with any authority whether these uses are unique or all too common. I can imagine there are other uses of this format that push boundaries and connect communities the same way that cassettes did. I’d love to hear more about them.
(The first four paragraphs of this review originally appeared in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March of this year.)
No comments:
Post a Comment