It is not really a surprise to see the cassette tape surging in popularity as a medium for getting your music out there. For a DIY music venture it's fairly perfect – with some basic equipment you can actually do it all yourself from home. Popularity of the medium has soared in recent years as we were all forced to stay at home.
Creating a good looking and sounding tape can certainly not be straightforward, and its easy to get rubbish results.
You don't want to record too hot and get unwanted clipping / distortion on the recording.
You need a tape recorder, blank tapes, packaging, and probably a printer unless you plan to do all of that by hand.
Given that the dwindling number of vinyl pressing plants out there are seeing huge demand (with COVID and raw material sourcing issues also causing problems) there is no wonder that growing numbers of artists and labels are turning to tapes.
I personally love tapes as they force me to listen to an album as the artist intended (all the tracks, in the correct order) and they also remove me from my phone for a while – I take my portable player out for a walk and leave my phone at home!
So I thought I would use my blog to talk about how I put together my first tape project alongside the mighty fine noise beast that is BLACKCLOUDSUMMONER. BCS contributed a wonderful interview (and some art) for my recent Intrusive Signals zine. He mentioned that he loved working on split releases, and we went from there. Luckily we both had a long form track that was suitable – both clocking in at around 16 minutes.
I had wanted to work on a longer piece for a while, attempting something with harsh noise elements as well as using a stainless steel percussive instrument I had made last year (I might do a seperate blog post about this creation that I have called the "Spyrimba"). I recorded the session as live as possible – but there was a degree of post processing. I used audacity and FL Studio to add additional layers and play with the EQ. I wanted to make something oppressive sounding, but with moments of clarity. I have listened to a lot of Scald Hymn and Moss Harvest recently and so I take these as an influence here.
The TEAC tape recorder I bought during lockdown for £25 on gumtree works fine 90% of the time, but occasionally the head mechanism sticks up which means you cannot eject the tape or operate any of the controls. So I had to remove the door giving me screwdriver access to the mechanism so you can carefully ease it out. There is probably something I can do to sort this out but I don't know what yet. I can foresee that one day one of the soldered joints will give way and it will stop working altogether.
In between recording I was designing then printing the J cards which I drew in my CAD software and good old MS Paint. I'm lucky enough to have a laser printer at home so using slightly thicker paper for the cards was not a problem, and also printing out the tape labels became a simple task.
Each sticker sheet had 12 labels (6 cassettes worth) and I did not want to try and line up text to each specific label, so I made a random repeating pattern that ensured that both our artist names would appear somewhere on each label. I then ran a highlighter over our names to show which track was on which side. The bonus of doing it this way is that there is loads of bits of printed label left over that include the pattern – I can use these for sealing the envelopes or using on future zines.
Sometimes the sticker labels go on wonky to the tape and they are a bugger to get off and realign.
The tapes I bought had the recording tabs already taken out (even though they were brand new) so I had to cut little bits of sellotape to stick over.
With a combination of borrowing my wife's paper guillotine and the kitchen scissors, I carefully cut out each J-Card, made a folding template, then used a steel ruler and scissor blade to score each fold line.
Why have I gone to
lengths to detail all of this?
Well, firstly it shows how
bloody awkward the tape can be. There are very good reasons why the
medium was superseded in the 90s by the CD. So I take my hats off to
the existing tape labels out there who are still releasing these on a regular basis.
I would imagine if I release some more in the future (and I probably
will, I have plenty of labels and a few blank shells left over) then
the entire process might be a bit easier. I might also look into
replacing or repairing the tape recorded because when the head shell
sticks it really is awkward to reset.
But anyway, I am really happy with the final product and I love the BCS track. Its a full on noise wig out with a savage kick drum that comes in near the end, and its mixed really well by Foul Prey. I did consider asking them to master my track too – it bugs me when one side of a split is weaker compared to the other and in this case my track probably is the weaker of the two – however I wanted this project to be completely DIY from my point of view so I stuck with my mixing and mastering efforts. Maybe in the future I will look for a fresh pair of ears to sort my mess out.....
And all this for selling the tapes at £5 each, with plenty of initial start up costs. But then if I wanted to make money at this, I would probably become a deep house DJ or whatever it is the kids are listening to these days.... noise / experimental / DIY music is for the love and the experience. But now I have the means for doing this again.... but do I want to? Yeah, probably. They look cool and hopefully a few people will buy them! I will also trade a few, and there are a few people who have sent me stuff in the past so there will be copies going their way.
The tape will be released soon via bandcamp. I will do another post detailing the actual release....
PS I'm still a kid and I love raving when I get the chance.
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