From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
Mono-manacled la Michael Jackson, although the glove is plain white cotton and definitely unsequined, Ken Oba shakes my bare hand with his sheathed one. No doubt this glove will be discarded before touching any of the Nakamichi real-time-recorded, direct-from-digital metal cassettes he is proudly describing to me. A cloned master recording of Joe Williams & His Blues All-Stars moans softly in the background. The original-once-removed clone is being fed in decoded analog form to thirty-two Nakamichi ZX-9 recording cassette decks, the decoder a deleted Sony product which has been fastidiously reworked and repackaged under the Nakamichi name. The connecting inputs to the cassette decks are gold-plated. The actual cassette parts are from TDK but are individually selected in Japan by Nakamichi and assembled by Nakamichi USA at their Torrance, California, plant. A computer monitors the thirty-two deck/tape interfaces and decides whether each marriage is to spec; those not making it are shut down.
Quality inspector Elaine Goldman is listening to each of their previous batch on a Nakamichi Dragon (another of their premium decks) with a Nakamichi headset, natch. For over a decade they've been making tape decks oriented exclusively to high fidelity, where a tape copy is ideally identical to its parent, and this new line of pre-recorded tapes is intended to showcase this capability.
Across the continent, in an Upper Montclair, New Jersey, attic, R. Stevie Moore, president of the R. Stevie Moore Cassette Club, is dubbing a copy from his personal uncloned master tape in response to a single mailed-in order. Each of the 120 or so purchasable items in R. Stevie's Tapography--composed, swiped, chronicled, or deranged in a continuing accumulation which began in 1968--has a listenability quotient which ranges from 1 (some of the tapes get as low as 2) to 10 (Stevie's particular ear heaven).
"Today is March eighteenth, 1982. Yesterday was March seventeenth, 1982. Tomorrow is March the nineteenth, 1982. The day after that must be the twentieth. I'm now speaking from Sam Goody's, talking to a handsome salesman (giggle). Yeah, he's cute. All right, that's enough..."--actual recording of customer testing tape recorder, in "Salesmanshit" from You and Your Employees, tape number NJ49, a collection of radio spots, jams, and songs, including Moore at age ten in a duet with Jim Reeves. Hi-fi isn't the issue; creativity is. After all, unlike Nakamichi, R. Stevie Moore is the source, and therefore under no obligation to make faithful transmutations of sounds to tape. Tape recorders are musical instruments--a bit monkey-see-monkey-do, but capable of being played expressively.
Audio cassettes now dominate the world of pre-recorded music. Records, while still treated fondly by some, are basically the dinosaurs of the scene. And while cassettes are the big item for mass-market commodities like Prince and Julio Iglesias, they are also ideally suited to minority specialist markets, where a viable product bracket is often the quantities less than a thousand, the threshold of vinyl feasibility. Between Stevie Moore and Ken Oba, as well as abroad, there are thousands of musicians and entrepreneurs personally producing, manufacturing, and distributing their own cassettes. The markets include special-interest groups (audio textural, sound archival, computer, etc.), certain countries (the Arab world is almost entirely cassette-oriented) and special cultural groups, unorthodox music, and high fidelity concerns. Unorthodox music still sells better on record than on cassette, creating a market for fantastic "bootleg" compilation tapes which, because of licensing restrictions, legitimate record companies would never be able to assemble.
The high fidelity cassette game includes, in addition to Nakamichi, two companies in New York, In-Synch Laboratories and Direct-To-Tape. Both feature non-electric music mostly of the European chamber or orchestral variety. Both (like Nakamichi) license tapes from record companies, but also feature their own productions. In-Synch has been presenting restored 78 rpm disc performances of orchestral music from the dawn of electrical recording in the late twenties. Direct-To-Tape specializes in recording church organs and other solo instruments, including clavichord, a precursor to the harpsichord and piano, which is extremely expressive and quiet--and difficult to record. In addition to about fifty tapes in many formats including Dolby C, dbx, and PCM digital on Beta or VHS, DTT sends out quarterly catalog supplements that have some very opinionated equipment reviews and recording primers.
Another company that offers the rarely-available Dolby C format (tapes encoded this way are less hissy when played back on decks equipped to decode them) is Trance Port Tapes in California. Although Dolby C isn't very common, all Trance Port Tapes use it. Co-producer A. Produce explains that the higher-quality reproduction will be appreciated by those who have the appropriate equipment, and that compatibility problems will probably not be noticed by those who don't. The music I've heard on their Mantra II compilation ranges from drone to spastic re-arrangement of Motown to slightly mesmerized rock, all very nicely coordinated to the four sides or, as they call them, "Regions" of the double tape package. Like all the companies mentioned here, Trance Port produces the tapes in real time on their own equipment. (Real time refers to the speed of the dubbing process; the copy and the original are run at normal, as opposed to high, playback speed, producing a higher-quality copy. For Nakamichi, In-Synch, DTT, and others, real time dubbing is the only way to get the quality they demand. For many small producers, real time is a way of economizing, by being one's own manufacturer.)
The most common method of reproducing cassettes is by running off dozens of copies on ten-inch spools or "pancakes," dubbing from a continuous loop which is fed through a bin at sixty-four times its normal speed. This entails designing and maintaining equipment which can reproduce frequencies of hundreds of thousands rather than thousands of Hertz at a speed of 10 feet per second (normal speed is 1 7/8 inches per second) while maintaining a stable path for a ribbon 1/8-inch wide and half a millimeter thick. The tape is then loaded into the cassette shells on other high-speed machines. For years these high-speed pre-recorded tapes foisted on the public were just awful; but since cassettes have become the dominant form in terms of sales, and since attempts at stemming the home taping of records have failed, the majors have begun to look at improving the high-speed, high-profit method of dubbing. Like toothpastes with secret ingredients, tape packages proclaim and rarely explain such processes as SDR (Super Dynamic Range) and QC10 (ten points of "European-style" quality control). This is the same sort of technical and pseudo-technical jargon that accompanied the early days of the LP. Gobbledygook or not, the quality of pre-recorded tapes has been getting remarkably better, and it's no longer a justifiable conceit that better results can be gotten with real-time domestic equipment. Nonetheless, many of the independent tape people are able to produce results superior to what they could possibly get from professional dubs or pressings. They can take the time to experiment and specifically fine-tune the best results for their material, instead of being ignored in the rat race that exists at most pressing plants and tape manufacturers. Low tech, in the hands of talented composers like diarist R. Stevie Moore and sensitive part-time wildman Eugene Chadbourne, can actually be a blessing. An irreverent approach and disrespect for the specified correct method of using recording equipment has produced lots of refreshing innovations in the musique concrte, dub mix, and scratch/hip-hop districts.
Cassette purveyors are able to flourish in the obsolescent market of mail order. Lightweight cassettes can be transported for a fraction of the cost of an LP. The big bonus for customers is that a lot of the mini-moguls of the alternative are so friendly in their correspondence. Tom Furgas in Ohio and Rik Rue of Pedestrian Tapes in Australia are examples of artists who encourage penpalship. Others, like dk of Toronto, shun any commercial consideration; their tapes are available only by trade. In other words, a rare case of music for music's sake.
The cassette entrepreneur suffers from poor display in record stores as well as consumer fears that what they might be buying is a novice musician's first access to a dictaphone. While generic types of music like heavy metal can usually be identified by the chrome-logo'd packaging, the only satisfying method of discernment in cases where an artist crosses, expands, or ignores the genres is listening (and very few record stores will ever do this). Since many cassette productions have cover graphics designed by the recording individuals themselves, the only information usually determinable is whether or not the musicians featured have gone to art school. Option's Scott Becker has said of "audio magazines": "[It's] another way of saying it's a compilation cassette enclosed in a fancy vinyl case along with some arty printed matter." The sound format of these collections is usually staid and predictable in comparison to the visuals, but a few outfits are experimenting with new ideas in this potentially distinctive medium. Many tape artists are also creating personalized multiples of their work, like the twentieth century artists who have made a tradition of the limited edition print--but so far without the exploitation. That these items are available for less than ten dollars is, in some cases, astounding.
At the home office of Nakamichi, in Japan, there is a concert hall in which occasional piano recitals and the like are given. Following the direct experience, upon leaving the hall, the listener is given a cassette which is a recording of the event as it happened, a microphone feed to several dozen behind-the-scenes Nakamichi (of course) decks. The reproduction can be compared to the original experience.
Meanwhile, R. Stevie Moore is making his latest song utterly distinctive by adjusting his equipment in such a way as to void any warranties. The original and reproduced experiences are both there on tape--which is about par for the course in the specialized world of cassettes. The medium is so malleable that if a listener no longer wants a particular acquisition, something else can be recorded over it. Try to do that with a record.
Mr. Oswald also wrote about Plunderphonics.
John Oswald can be heard here as Mystery Tape Laboratories, excerpted from the Cassette Mythos Audio Alchemy CD/K7
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