From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
Welcome to Cassette Mythos! Contained herein are tales of today's electronic audio pioneers and modern folk artists. These are reports from the front: an insider's look at a phenomenon that has galvanized and revolutionized contemporary culture. Cassette Mythos is a collection of thoughts, recollections, strategies, field maps, confessions, and blueprints for the future by the people who have helped make it happen.
I first became involved in the independent cassette scene back in 1983. A friend of mine, Rick Karcasheff, showed me some copies of Op and ND magazines when I was at his house one day. In these magazines I read about people who recorded their music at home and then released it independently on cassettes. I had recorded a lot of material with Debbie Jaffe (now of Master/Slave Relationship) using a Pioneer cassette deck and stereo microphone. It was mostly my obtuse neo-pseudo-Dada poetry rants with Debbie's excruciatingly minimal backing of Casio MT-11 and (the dreaded) Casiotone. Karcasheff suggested we write down some of the addresses we found and get in touch with some of the people.
We sent cassettes of our music (we called ourselves Viscera) to people we read about in places like Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, England, and Germany. Many of them sent us interesting, crazy, and often downright bizarre cassettes of their own sonic explorations. Getting into the cassette scene was exciting! We were linked together with people in every corner of the Earth because we shared a set of common ideals and goals. We were not satisfied to sit around and wait for the big record companies to tap us on the shoulder one day and tell us it was our turn to be a star. There was too much to say, too much territory to explore, too much music that just had to be heard, for us to be restrained by mainstream commercial concerns. We believed in the idea that art and the creative spirit belong not just to an elite few, but to everybody. This idea was the spark that set the fire that still rages almost ten years later.
The audio cassette is the perfect vehicle: inexpensive, portable, and malleable. Few of us in those days (and even now) had the hundreds or thousands of dollars it cost to get a record pressed and released. Cassettes, on the other hand, are accessible to anyone and everyone. They can be purchased in a department store or drug store for a dollar or two apiece. So if you have a couple of cassette recorders, you're ready to record, duplicate, and distribute cassettes of your music (or whatever) to as many or as few people as your desire and pocketbook allow. The cassette is the counterculture's most dangerous and subversive weapon. It is a threat, an incendiary device, the perfect tool for the cultural anarchist. It's a letter to your best friend in Wichita, or a record of your secret dream diary. You can use a cassette to make recordings of those new songs you just wrote--just you, your old guitar, a few pots and pans, a microphone, and a 4-track cassette recorder. Or how about this: you record a speech by a particularly asinine politician onto a cassette; then you go back, scramble up his words, rearrange them, cut in words of your own. What did he say? The mass media and big entertainment companies feel their monopoly on information and its dissemination slipping away--cassettes truly are the most democratic art form!
The compact size and light weight of the cassette lend themselves to an efficient and inexpensive dissemination of information. You can take or send a cassette just about anywhere; it's unobtrusive, easily concealed, and not bulky or awkward to transport. But the cassette is a lot more than just a surrogate vinyl record or compact disc, or the pauper stepbrother of these other mediums. Records, besides the fact that their production makes them cost-prohibitive to the majority of the population, tend to be rather inflexible and static. They are meant to be mass-produced items, with hundreds, thousands, or millions of identical copies with the same content. By their nature they are limited to being a consumable item, with no interaction from the listener; they are etched in stone, rather like monuments or edifices. As for CDs, it remains to be seen how far and in what direction digital technology takes us with this beast. I don't know of very many people, if any, who have the home technology to record their own music on CD and then duplicate any quantity. The CD doesn't come off as a very human or friendly medium; its icy, digital perfection will ultimately appeal only to audiophiles whose main interest lies not in content, but in production values (form). The bell is tolling for the big record and mass media companies because the producer-money-consumer equation is being broken down. What makes the worldwide cassette movement so unique is that it is a society of real participants, producers instead of passive consumers.
Over the last seven years I have been in contact with hundreds of cassette artists who each exhibit a unique and highly individualized style. I've received cassettes that run the gamut of musical and sonic styles from hardcore industrial and power electronics with their gloomy, apocalyptic visions of a world bent for hell and destruction; to synthesizer and computer music explorations deep into the sonic unknown; to musique concr¸te, electromagnetic tape experiments and voice/text cut-ups; to punk, pop, and avant-rock mutations; to environmental recordings and audio veritˇ documentaries; to simple folk songs and talking letters from friends; and countless combinations and variations of all these. The possibilities of what you'll hear on a cassette you receive in the mail are absolutely infinite. And you can get involved, you can interact and communicate with people from every nook, cranny, valley, mountaintop, metropolis, and village on this planet! It is no secret that the world is much smaller than it used to be--I have better friends in New York and Germany than I do next door, and geographical distance does not mean so much any more. Technology has brought us closer to one another, all four and a half billion of us, and we can all share sounds, words, and ideas in a matter of minutes and days, instead of weeks, months, or even years. So the speed of exchange of information and cultural cross-pollination becomes more rapid, more volatile, more exciting!
Cassette Mythos is a good place to get started. It's an excellent resource guide, as well as a focal point and locus for spreading that benign virus called communication. Read the articles, and ponder the ideas and methods. A whole new world is opening up before you! Make some copies of your cassette; get out some envelopes, tape, and postage stamps; and get busy and write to some of the people you read about in this book. It's time to create your own vision, your own legends.
Onward electronic audio pioneers everywhere!
Here is the index of this electronic book.
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