Synchronicity
And not the Police album, although I do like it. First half mostly.
In the 90s, as some of you who've been paying attention may remember, I released a series of cassette albums as Platzangst. At the time, pre-Internet, that was how a lot of the underground musicians did things. You recorded an album of music, often on lo-fi equipment, and tried to sell it by mail order. You'd have xeroxed flyers to tuck in envelopes, you'd trade tapes with other musicians.
For a number of reasons I dropped out of that scene for a long while. My connections to the underground experimental community waned. I've been trying to make more pop/rock oriented albums.
My favorite record store - Record Collector in Iowa City - often has a "free" box near the door where whatever's inside is up for grabs, and this can include old junk albums nobody wants, both vinyl and CD, sometimes promo items from labels giving away samples to create buzz, even indie and local musicians attempting to just get their work noticed. Not long ago, I scooped up a handful of the latter kind of stuff, label samplers and weird CDR releases of free jazz and noise and stuff. And among that batch was one cassette tape.
It was easy enough to listen to the CDs in my car, but I only have tape decks at home, and lately at home I've not been actively listening to music, I've been trying to create it. So the tape sat around for a while, unplayed, half-forgotten.
In February, as you ought to know, I created my first actual album in years, Our Corporate Strategy (no, I won't post that player again). Instead of pop or rock I went back to noisy experimental weirdness. I sent a CD-packaged copy to the RPM Challenge center. I idly wondered if I could reconnect with that old underground.
A couple weeks ago I purchased a used CD by an artist named John Wiese - who makes what we call "noise" as a genre of music. There was a URL on the CD case for the record label.
Shortly thereafter, I came across this on the Warren Ellis blog:
Indignant Senlity - Plays Wagner Volume 1 by _type
ha ha. Not my music in a player, but another Flash player. "Indignant Senility Plays Wagner". An album of eerie droning soundscapes. Looking up the description on the website of the record label releasing this as a vinyl LP, I was surprised to learn in a throwaway sentence that the artist, Indignant Senility, originally released this album - on cassette. In the post-cassette era. Did artists still do that cassette stuff? I began to do some Googling.
Looking up the label for the John Wiese CD, I found a forum dedicated to noise music (with some less-noise-based experimental stuff on the side), which Google also pointed towards, and I learned that yes, indeed, many musicians were still releasing music on cassette tapes. For a while I had been kind of interested in going through my collection of old cassettes and dubbing some of them to digital; sadly, my longtime cassette deck had quit working. Now, seeing this forum, i kind of was wondering if I could, myself, get back into tape trading as well as CD trading, MP3 trading, whatever.
It has motivated me to seek out a repair shop that can handle fixing the thing (the manufacturer, Sony, does not make that model of deck anymore, and in fact probably does not make a cassette deck of any kind that has the same features, and their online repair service stated that I'd most likely get "an equivalent exchange" if I sent it in, and I figure I'd get some crappy inferior substitute, so, no thanks Sony).
Tomorrow I take the tape deck and drop it off to get it fixed. I'm looking forward to digging out some tapes and playing them again. Maybe I'll be dubbing more of my own home-grown tapes, trading them. Maybe.
A couple hours ago I moved a stack of stuff and saw that cassette I got from the free box. Read the cover label.
The artist: Indignant Senility. Album: Plays Wagner.
In the 90s, as some of you who've been paying attention may remember, I released a series of cassette albums as Platzangst. At the time, pre-Internet, that was how a lot of the underground musicians did things. You recorded an album of music, often on lo-fi equipment, and tried to sell it by mail order. You'd have xeroxed flyers to tuck in envelopes, you'd trade tapes with other musicians.
For a number of reasons I dropped out of that scene for a long while. My connections to the underground experimental community waned. I've been trying to make more pop/rock oriented albums.
My favorite record store - Record Collector in Iowa City - often has a "free" box near the door where whatever's inside is up for grabs, and this can include old junk albums nobody wants, both vinyl and CD, sometimes promo items from labels giving away samples to create buzz, even indie and local musicians attempting to just get their work noticed. Not long ago, I scooped up a handful of the latter kind of stuff, label samplers and weird CDR releases of free jazz and noise and stuff. And among that batch was one cassette tape.
It was easy enough to listen to the CDs in my car, but I only have tape decks at home, and lately at home I've not been actively listening to music, I've been trying to create it. So the tape sat around for a while, unplayed, half-forgotten.
In February, as you ought to know, I created my first actual album in years, Our Corporate Strategy (no, I won't post that player again). Instead of pop or rock I went back to noisy experimental weirdness. I sent a CD-packaged copy to the RPM Challenge center. I idly wondered if I could reconnect with that old underground.
A couple weeks ago I purchased a used CD by an artist named John Wiese - who makes what we call "noise" as a genre of music. There was a URL on the CD case for the record label.
Shortly thereafter, I came across this on the Warren Ellis blog:
Indignant Senlity - Plays Wagner Volume 1 by _type
ha ha. Not my music in a player, but another Flash player. "Indignant Senility Plays Wagner". An album of eerie droning soundscapes. Looking up the description on the website of the record label releasing this as a vinyl LP, I was surprised to learn in a throwaway sentence that the artist, Indignant Senility, originally released this album - on cassette. In the post-cassette era. Did artists still do that cassette stuff? I began to do some Googling.
Looking up the label for the John Wiese CD, I found a forum dedicated to noise music (with some less-noise-based experimental stuff on the side), which Google also pointed towards, and I learned that yes, indeed, many musicians were still releasing music on cassette tapes. For a while I had been kind of interested in going through my collection of old cassettes and dubbing some of them to digital; sadly, my longtime cassette deck had quit working. Now, seeing this forum, i kind of was wondering if I could, myself, get back into tape trading as well as CD trading, MP3 trading, whatever.
It has motivated me to seek out a repair shop that can handle fixing the thing (the manufacturer, Sony, does not make that model of deck anymore, and in fact probably does not make a cassette deck of any kind that has the same features, and their online repair service stated that I'd most likely get "an equivalent exchange" if I sent it in, and I figure I'd get some crappy inferior substitute, so, no thanks Sony).
Tomorrow I take the tape deck and drop it off to get it fixed. I'm looking forward to digging out some tapes and playing them again. Maybe I'll be dubbing more of my own home-grown tapes, trading them. Maybe.
A couple hours ago I moved a stack of stuff and saw that cassette I got from the free box. Read the cover label.
The artist: Indignant Senility. Album: Plays Wagner.