Cassette Culture Is Crap Culture.
If Your Humble Narrator's physical record collection is called "The Concrete Standard," and the filesystem of digital copies is "La Norme Concrète," then what, pray tell, should the parallel collection of compact cassette tapes be dubbed? The very nature of the previous two titles are indicative of the quasi-permanency of each respective format; compact discs and vinyl albums exist in a concrete, hard-copy form, and music files, while not exactly corporeal, still take up space on a hard drive. Cassettes, on the other hand, are inherently temporary; their very structure betrays flimsiness, fragility, and vulnerabilities to the elements.
How did we ever get so latched onto such a crap format?
The past day and night have been spent elbows-deep in The Concrete Standard's magnetic evil twin, the Ferrous Oxide Pit Of Despair, or whatever it eventually gets called. The label is a moot point, as these latest action have started a campaign to relegate most of the contents of these shelf-saggers to the local landfill, sooner or later. It's been a decision a long time coming, and not one without a certain amount of heartache and sentimentality attached to it, but the bottom line is that as much influence these little shells of plastic and papers had on my formative years, they are also keeping me from moving on in a certain sense.
Ironically, getting rid of the Magnetic Black Hole is more problematic than excising items from The Concrete Standard. While compact discs and vinyl are like master tapes, (pardon the mixed metaphors) cassettes are just copies, and their contents are not always readily reproducible if a tape gets eaten or melted or unstrung. The worst and most problematic example at Monkworks is the 500+ airchecks from the Negativland and SubGenius radio shows that air at inconvenient hours of the night here in California. Not only are a majority of these programs unavailable in any other format, (aside from certain niche fans who make them available online) but the sheer volume precludes any possibility of cataloging and organizing them by content, let alone listening to any of them ever again. Currently, there is a selection of shows that have been converted to mp3s, and another selection that have been hacked up and re-edited into "best-of" mixes, (ironically, dubbed onto more cassettes) but for the most part, this is an archive of absurdity that belongs in a museum, never to be touched or heard from again.
And I don't want to live in a museum.
To-day I removed at least a hundred extraneous cassettes from the premises; mostly just junk mixes made from bits and pieces of disparate records, straight-from-CD DJ jams, and one-off bootlegs that benefited from onesy-and-twosey listens. Even with such a sizable chunk gone, there still remains an unmanageable amount of items in the Type II Library Of Doom, but at least other minimizing projects have cleared out sufficient closet space to hide some of them away, if only to pretend that they don't exist for a little while longer.
Of course, I'm never going to get rid of them all, even with my best efforts at minimization and consolidation. There are some things that are too far embedded in my psyche to extricate easily, even when I know that I've safely and successfully duplicated and saved them. I'll hang on to my crumbling collection of WDGC airchecks, now over twenty years old, until they finally snap and disintegrate. Some of my early theme mixes and ad hoc mixes from raiding the various radio stations I've done time at will stay for as long as there's a possibility of an extended road trip in the future with a friendly passenger I want to impress/freak out. And more than one Norelco case with cleverly-cut J-card art will have a spot saved, even if it's empty.
Old tapeworms die hard.
⎋
How did we ever get so latched onto such a crap format?
The past day and night have been spent elbows-deep in The Concrete Standard's magnetic evil twin, the Ferrous Oxide Pit Of Despair, or whatever it eventually gets called. The label is a moot point, as these latest action have started a campaign to relegate most of the contents of these shelf-saggers to the local landfill, sooner or later. It's been a decision a long time coming, and not one without a certain amount of heartache and sentimentality attached to it, but the bottom line is that as much influence these little shells of plastic and papers had on my formative years, they are also keeping me from moving on in a certain sense.
Ironically, getting rid of the Magnetic Black Hole is more problematic than excising items from The Concrete Standard. While compact discs and vinyl are like master tapes, (pardon the mixed metaphors) cassettes are just copies, and their contents are not always readily reproducible if a tape gets eaten or melted or unstrung. The worst and most problematic example at Monkworks is the 500+ airchecks from the Negativland and SubGenius radio shows that air at inconvenient hours of the night here in California. Not only are a majority of these programs unavailable in any other format, (aside from certain niche fans who make them available online) but the sheer volume precludes any possibility of cataloging and organizing them by content, let alone listening to any of them ever again. Currently, there is a selection of shows that have been converted to mp3s, and another selection that have been hacked up and re-edited into "best-of" mixes, (ironically, dubbed onto more cassettes) but for the most part, this is an archive of absurdity that belongs in a museum, never to be touched or heard from again.
And I don't want to live in a museum.
To-day I removed at least a hundred extraneous cassettes from the premises; mostly just junk mixes made from bits and pieces of disparate records, straight-from-CD DJ jams, and one-off bootlegs that benefited from onesy-and-twosey listens. Even with such a sizable chunk gone, there still remains an unmanageable amount of items in the Type II Library Of Doom, but at least other minimizing projects have cleared out sufficient closet space to hide some of them away, if only to pretend that they don't exist for a little while longer.
Of course, I'm never going to get rid of them all, even with my best efforts at minimization and consolidation. There are some things that are too far embedded in my psyche to extricate easily, even when I know that I've safely and successfully duplicated and saved them. I'll hang on to my crumbling collection of WDGC airchecks, now over twenty years old, until they finally snap and disintegrate. Some of my early theme mixes and ad hoc mixes from raiding the various radio stations I've done time at will stay for as long as there's a possibility of an extended road trip in the future with a friendly passenger I want to impress/freak out. And more than one Norelco case with cleverly-cut J-card art will have a spot saved, even if it's empty.
Old tapeworms die hard.
⎋