The Cure For The Common Tapeworm, part 5.
More compact cassette tape designs, mostly from the bottom of the creative barrel, but still watermarks from their day:
On the left, SKC's type 1 GX90, an otherwise unremarkable tape, if not for the rad new-wave accents; the clear shell is peppered with blue and white hashmarks and set off with a red paint splash. Center and right, the Laser type 1 XL Plus; whose name is an obvious casualty of the 80s and bland shell design makes it doomed for convenience store point-of-purchase displays. This is partially balanced by the completely incongruous pseudo-pixel design of the J-card; it's like a tiny piece of art, suitable for framing or trading with your friends.
Some of the more tragic designs witnessed. On the left, the J-card for a Larksong cassette which displays some puzzling oddities once you get past the banal grid pattern and insipid color scheme. The silhouetted dove suggests some kind of church or ministry connection, or perhaps just an outreach program. The bizarre quasi-technobabble "Micro Acicular Ferrix" makes you apprehensive to touch the thing without latex gloves. And in the fine print below, the completely arbitrary recording time: 85 minutes, or 42 and a half minutes on each side.
Center, the J-card for the SMAT HD C-90, an awkwardly horrid name until you figure out that it's just an unfortunate acronym. "SM" for Sunkyoung Magnetic, and "AT" for "audio tape," presumably. Aside from the name, and the bile-and-mucous colors, the stylized oscillating waves is a gentle reminder of the simpler, shape-based, linear design of the late 60s.
There's no excuse for the 70s, however, and the rotten, touchy-feely, oatmeal-tones of Scotch's type 1 C-90 J-card, at right. Everything that's wrong is on full display, from the woman's lax no-hairdo, the dude's turtleneck top, and the juxtaposition of the two, creating the image of her being seduced by her beau's dreamy fingerstyle playing and heartsick crooning, all by the proxy of magnetic tape.
Finally, a pleasant oddity from Akai. While the case and J-card designs are completely backwards and counterintuitive, the company has to be given credit for breaking out and introducing a model to compete with the eventually ubiquitous Norelco case, in the hopes of it becoming an industry standard.
It didn't, obviously; and using Akai's case can be maddening. A notch on one longways end allows access, wherein the case splits into two halves that hold the cassette and J-card together when closed, but separates them when opened; unlike Norelco cases, which nest the cassette in the fold of the J-card. One can see how this might appeal to efficiency nerds; easy access to both cassette and J-card without having to "disassemble" one from the other. There are notches on the flat gray tray of the cassette's half that are supposed to fit the shell's unique curves, but putting it all back together again is almost always an effort of trial and error. Not to mention that the case can't be opened one-handed, a skill any avid mixtape engineer has mastered while on long road trips.
...
Some final thoughts: like any other piece of blank media, cassettes are only a technological vehicle for an otherwise incorporeal art form, music, to hitch a ride on; in this sense, tapes are no different than the hard disk drives that contain so many of our record collections now. And there's nothing wrong with that; it's logical progression, it just isn't as romantic.
Tapes can stretch and warp and break, but for so long we overlooked these inherent weaknesses and considered them necessary evils, maybe even to the point of associating them with the same temporary state suffered by cut flowers or a well-assembled meal or a few minutes captured alone with someone else. When given as gifts, or love letters, or peace offerings, it takes more than one pass through side A and side B to interpret the sender's message or personality or intent, because there is all the art presented in the contents of the playlist to burrow down into first.
We use other people's art to express ourselves more properly.
...
So, anyone want a mixtape?
⎋
On the left, SKC's type 1 GX90, an otherwise unremarkable tape, if not for the rad new-wave accents; the clear shell is peppered with blue and white hashmarks and set off with a red paint splash. Center and right, the Laser type 1 XL Plus; whose name is an obvious casualty of the 80s and bland shell design makes it doomed for convenience store point-of-purchase displays. This is partially balanced by the completely incongruous pseudo-pixel design of the J-card; it's like a tiny piece of art, suitable for framing or trading with your friends.
Some of the more tragic designs witnessed. On the left, the J-card for a Larksong cassette which displays some puzzling oddities once you get past the banal grid pattern and insipid color scheme. The silhouetted dove suggests some kind of church or ministry connection, or perhaps just an outreach program. The bizarre quasi-technobabble "Micro Acicular Ferrix" makes you apprehensive to touch the thing without latex gloves. And in the fine print below, the completely arbitrary recording time: 85 minutes, or 42 and a half minutes on each side.
Center, the J-card for the SMAT HD C-90, an awkwardly horrid name until you figure out that it's just an unfortunate acronym. "SM" for Sunkyoung Magnetic, and "AT" for "audio tape," presumably. Aside from the name, and the bile-and-mucous colors, the stylized oscillating waves is a gentle reminder of the simpler, shape-based, linear design of the late 60s.
There's no excuse for the 70s, however, and the rotten, touchy-feely, oatmeal-tones of Scotch's type 1 C-90 J-card, at right. Everything that's wrong is on full display, from the woman's lax no-hairdo, the dude's turtleneck top, and the juxtaposition of the two, creating the image of her being seduced by her beau's dreamy fingerstyle playing and heartsick crooning, all by the proxy of magnetic tape.
Finally, a pleasant oddity from Akai. While the case and J-card designs are completely backwards and counterintuitive, the company has to be given credit for breaking out and introducing a model to compete with the eventually ubiquitous Norelco case, in the hopes of it becoming an industry standard.
It didn't, obviously; and using Akai's case can be maddening. A notch on one longways end allows access, wherein the case splits into two halves that hold the cassette and J-card together when closed, but separates them when opened; unlike Norelco cases, which nest the cassette in the fold of the J-card. One can see how this might appeal to efficiency nerds; easy access to both cassette and J-card without having to "disassemble" one from the other. There are notches on the flat gray tray of the cassette's half that are supposed to fit the shell's unique curves, but putting it all back together again is almost always an effort of trial and error. Not to mention that the case can't be opened one-handed, a skill any avid mixtape engineer has mastered while on long road trips.
...
Some final thoughts: like any other piece of blank media, cassettes are only a technological vehicle for an otherwise incorporeal art form, music, to hitch a ride on; in this sense, tapes are no different than the hard disk drives that contain so many of our record collections now. And there's nothing wrong with that; it's logical progression, it just isn't as romantic.
Tapes can stretch and warp and break, but for so long we overlooked these inherent weaknesses and considered them necessary evils, maybe even to the point of associating them with the same temporary state suffered by cut flowers or a well-assembled meal or a few minutes captured alone with someone else. When given as gifts, or love letters, or peace offerings, it takes more than one pass through side A and side B to interpret the sender's message or personality or intent, because there is all the art presented in the contents of the playlist to burrow down into first.
We use other people's art to express ourselves more properly.
...
So, anyone want a mixtape?
⎋