From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
Music is a reciprocal art; there is the musician, and then there is the listener. The world is populated by hundreds of millions of musicians, but only a handful are heard, even fewer are discussed, and a smaller minority are incorporated into history long enough to be outlived by their music. Artists can spend their entire lives telling the world what innovative instrumentalists they are and how their techniques could inalterably change music, but without the opinions of an audience, there's no social justification for what they are doing. It is not inconceivable for a musician to want to work in a vacuum, and many do, but even those individuals often desire a critical perspective. Whether the artist likes it or not, the merits of the music are determined by the listener through a judging process in which the musician plays no part. In order for a musician to receive this critical reaction, there has to be a way to bring the music to the public. Before the twentieth century, paper was the best means of music transference and preservation; now, it's recordings.
Cassettes are currently the simplest and most artistically pure way of sharing sounds. The only tools required are blank tapes, cassette decks, envelopes, and stamps. The peripheral concerns involved in making, marketing, and manufacturing records or CDs are not considerations here. Cassettes are fast, direct, cheap, and limitless, but oddly, they were not always seen as legitimate. Although the cassette has been around for over twenty-five years, its potential has only begun to be fully realized in the last ten.
Musicians once viewed the record as the only acceptable medium for distributing their music. The only time the cassette ever entered the equation was as an intermediary--a master tape recorded on a four-track deck and brought to a manufacturer to be translated into bumps on a grooved disc. Few artists considered distributing the music they'd stored on cassettes, partly because critics, retailers, and other musicians didn't take the format seriously. For people working with new approaches to sound, which often cannot find acceptance for the sole reason that they are new, there was almost no possibility for even a minimum of exposure.
Together, these factors created a perfect environment for an underground to develop. At the beginning of the seventies, some people were making music for fun, recording it on cassette and mailing it to friends and relatives, while others were sending tape-letters to friends; these were the first networkers. A few decided to extend their musical reach beyond their acquaintances, and began to search for an audience by treating their cassettes as finished products, an idea which was slow to find acceptance. Among the more prominent early cassette releases were Barry Pilcher's Valley of the Singing Saxophones and Paul Kelday's electronic music cassettes. Faust from Germany and Throbbing Gristle from England, besides being significant influences on the free-form rattle and hum of the cassette musicians, were also among the first and most prominent networkers, not only releasing cassettes, but soliciting them--proving that small, independent ventures can succeed without the help of major labels. Faust tapes that were sent to friends became fast-selling bootlegs that could only be obtained through the mail; Throbbing Gristle released early cassettes of groups like Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire on their Industrial label. Throbbing Gristle's most infamous release was an attache case containing twenty-four live cassettes (each dubbed over a recording of an Abba album). Rough Trade later released a thirty-three-cassette compendium of Throbbing Gristle live concerts, although they soon scrapped the idea and began selling the tapes individually. One of the only other ways to distribute and obtain cassettes at this time was through newsletters, and Throbbing Gristle put out one of the first newsletters calling for strange cassettes, providing an impetus for many others to begin trading tapes. Other newsletters for home tapers soon sprouted. (Matt Johnson, before he became The The, put out a newsletter filled with contact addresses.)
In the United States, in 1977, The Residents were selling cassettes by mail to their hundred-member fan club, while bootlegs of their parent label's Ralph Radio Special broadcast from the West Coast began turning up in odd places. Experimental radio shows, like Ralph's, also encouraged home taping by soliciting for send-in material to be played on the air. In fact, pop anomaly Weird Al Yankovic got his start by mailing recordings of himself playing accordion in the bathroom to John Gullak's California radio show.
A few rock bands also became disgusted with record labels, and began marketing demo tapes as cassette releases, most notably funk-punkers Godzilla. Other unsigned rock bands tried to make extra money by recording cassette releases to sell during concerts. Another catalyst for the trading of rock music tapes was political, and in the late seventies, The Plastic People of the Universe and other (literally) jailhouse rock bands started smuggling their music across the iron curtain by way of the cassette medium.
By the close of the seventies, labels appeared; first as quasi-legitimate vehicles for one's own music, but later as sources for music from friends and mail contacts. One of the first such ventures was R. Stevie Moore's Cassette Club, a mail-order source for all of Moore's music since 1971. For $8, Moore provided the purchaser with ninety minutes of music culled from his repertoire of hundreds of songs. Requests were honored, each cassette containing a different mix of music and coming with a money-back guarantee. Other leading early labels were begun by Alain Neffe with Insane Music in Belgium, Rod Summers with Vec in Holland, Clive Robertson with Voicespondence Magazine in Canada, Vittore Baroni with the Archivo Sonoro in Italy, and Ylem in Japan. Eurock was one of the first distributors to take cassettes seriously in the United States (as was Sonic Distribution Co.), primarily dealing in European progressive rock and experimental electronics.
People seemed enamored with the instant results of this democratic medium--anybody could produce an outstanding finished product with two cassette decks and one gram of dedication. It fit in perfectly with the do-it-yourself mentality, the independence myth so inculcated in contemporary society. The Third Mind record label, as well as others, began as a strictly cassette label. Their first project, a series of cassette compilations called Rising From The Red Sand, was one of the most influential early tape documents. Even Rough Trade began a cassette subsidiary, Rough Tapes, and the rock label SubPop started as a cassette fanzine. Downtown New York guitarist Elliott Sharp released cassettes on his Zoar label, and prolific guitarist Loren Mazzacane started Daggett as a forum for his blues-inspired eclecticism, although both, like many others, pressed their better-recorded material on album.
Early in the eighties, the pace quickened. It was inevitable; cassettes were the quickest and easiest way to share sound. In Amsterdam, Belgium, Germany, and Australia, with Pedestrian Tapes and Fast Forward cassette magazine, tapes were big early on. The Western world soon discovered that their evolution was being paralleled quite noisily in Japan, particularly by groups like Tuf and the duo Merzbow.
In 1979, the single most important influence on home tapers came into existence: Op Magazine, a tabloid dedicated to alternative music. By its fifth (or "E") issue, Graham Ingels had managed to talk Foster into starting a cassette column called Castanets. Castanets was the first readily available forum for cassette reviews with contact addresses, and Ingels (initially worried that there wouldn't be enough releases to sustain the column) soon found himself overwhelmed. By 1983 (the "O" issue), Op had grown tremendously: it was now printed in a glossy format and available in many retail stores. Castanets was growing larger, wearing Ingels thinner; still, he was determined to listen to and mention every cassette he received.
He didn't know what he was getting himself into. There were hundreds of musicians who had been working in a vacuum with electronic and experimental music for years, and now suddenly they had a way to extend their outreach, and in the process get a cursory review of their music. Most of these artists didn't even know that anyone was doing the same thing they were, and ecstatically wrote to get in touch with their invisible cohorts. This led to extended musical families, all fathered by Castanets. Meanwhile, Ingels was swamped, as more and more musicians were discovering that their demo tapes and recorded rehearsals could be treated as final products.
Most of the prolific cassette characters currently active tapped into cassettes through Op, including Al Margolis of Sound of Pig, Hal McGee of Cause and Effect (and Electronic Cottage Magazine), and tireless documentalist Robin James. During Op's four-year life, before it split into Sound Choice and Option, scores of labels came into existence. It soon became clear that anyone could realize their dream of running a private label: the only necessary investments were in the aforementioned stamps, envelopes, and blank tape, and after a year or two of giving away promotional cassettes, the label might begin to support itself. Swinging Axe Productions (SAP), for example, was started by Randy Grief as an attempt to make his music "legitimate." After a few reviews, letters came in from other artists asking Grief to release their music on SAP, and Grief couldn't say no. Mike Jackson began his XKurzhen Sound label at the age of thirteen, and Al Margolis started Sound of Pig with ten dollars.
The upshot of this was that cassettes could work outside of the commercial world, remaining artistically pure because no stigma of "selling out" was attached to them. The music was dubbed in real time and recorded on better quality tape than major label releases, and it could often be obtained by trade or simply by sending a blank cassette and a SASE. No producers were foolish enough to think they could make a living off cassettes, and accordingly they sold their releases for little more than the price of raw materials.
That is, until Neil Cooper, inspired by cassette releases from more mainstream artists like Bow Wow Wow and Elvis Costello, formed ReachOut International Records, or ROIR, in 1981. ROIR began as a cassette alternative for signing well-known bands who had or were looking for vinyl; now, ROIR's cassettes are manufactured in quantities of three thousand to four thousand, and the label's Bad Brains cassette (released before the band had any vinyl releases) holds the distinction of being the best-selling cassette-only release ever: over 27,000 units sold.
With the cassette glut in the mid-eighties, several people tried to organize things. Alex Douglas in Vancouver put out a comprehensive Contact List of Electronic Musicians; No Commercial Potential also attempted to bring the culture together into one cohesive unit; yet the problem with these magazines was that by the time they were printed and mailed, they were usually half out of date. Scores of "audio magazines" and cassette fanzines popped up, firing off a few issues and then disappearing. Zig-Zag, in Australia, allegedly published the first book to deal entirely with cassettes.
The next step was to find alternative ways of working with cassettes. Robin James and Conrad Schnitzler performed cassette concerts (oblivious to each others inventions - RJ), the Antenna Theater under Chris Hardiman in California released instructional cassettes and held guided cassette journeys, Miekal And and Liz Was used cassettes in sundry sound installations, and Michael Sprague revolutionized networking with his Environmental Tape Exchange in Australia. Sprague would ask people to hang a microphone outside their window and send in the sounds. Once the recording, with no overdubbing or manipulation, was sent to Sprague, he would send, in return, a similar tape made elsewhere--from India, Jordan, or virtually anywhere else on the globe.
Another border-opening innovation was "bicycling": laying down a few tracks on a four-track and sending the tape to overseas collaborators to complete, creating a "global band." Perhaps the master of this form is Zan Hoffman, who in 1988 had 120 different releases--although his entire equipment inventory consisted of a dual cassette deck with a mono line in and a portable Sanyo tape deck. His semi-label consists of material sent to him which he digests and re-organizes onto new cassettes, occasionally adding himself in. He rarely makes more than five copies of any cassette, sends no promotional copies to radio stations and magazines, and only operates through trade (no money), which is extraordinary considering that almost every name in the network has sent him material to play with. His most extraordinary side project is his group the Grand Brothers, a vocal and acoustic guitar duo who perform weekly in local spots playing acoustic covers of electronic songs Zan receives in the mail.
Others, too, expanded on the idea of cassette networking: John Oswald, of Mystery Tape Laboratory in Canada, extended his charade to the point of creating a mythical Professor X to head the label, and sending guidelines to members of the press writing about his operations; Mark Murrell, whose Silent, but Deadly cassette covers are more valuable than the contents, started painting, airbrushing, and artistically altering the packaging of his releases, which sell for anywhere from $2 to $200; Touch in England set new standards of production quality and packaging; and Kentucky Fried Royalty tried to match faces with sounds by holding the First International Cassette Makers Conference in Cologne in 1989.
In the last few years, the world of cassette-making has exploded. There is such an overwhelming number of releases that cassettes can no longer be thought of as an underground phenomenon, and there certainly isn't one cohesive network. There is still a lot of networking, though, which can foster the growth of cross-cultural families. More important, there is still a lot of ground left to be covered.
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