Author Topic: Cassette tapes.. (Read 10778 times)

einstein36 · « **on:** February 04, 2011, 08:34:44 PM »

Man oh man....what one finds in one's collection of old cassette tapes...I just find if anyone remembers from the Hearts of Space Label, Ken Stover(which btw is he still around) His Sir Dancelot's Dream...and I found an old Nightingale album from the Higher Octave music label....
man..I actually had to go find me a stinking tape player and some batteries to listen to this great music...hahahaha
one might want to dig around in your collection and see what you might find:)

jkn · « **Reply #1 on:** February 05, 2011, 11:32:29 AM »

I have 4 boxes (kind of like bankers boxes but long and not very tall) of cassettes. Don't think I have any ambient related tapes - but tons of 80's stuff. I really should prune that down to just one box...

:-)

einstein36 · « **Reply #2 on:** February 05, 2011, 11:51:04 AM »

LOl...nah....who knows...maybe somewhere in our collection there's a cassette tape probably worth thousands of dollars someone wants:).....
I definitely going to have go through mine and see if I can convert them to mp3 format so I can play them in my car:)

sraymar · « **Reply #3 on:** February 05, 2011, 01:56:14 PM »

I still have a wooden cassette rack on my wall that holds 100 cassettes plus about six long plastic cases full of them. I've got alot of old Musical Starstreams programs from the early 90s, Franke, Arkenstone, Mars Lasar, Davol, and more. My car has a cassette player but the one near my PC went belly up. I'll have to get another one someday while they still make them. I believe you can get a cassette player that fits in your PC for mp3 transfer convenience.

hdibrell · « **Reply #4 on:** February 05, 2011, 04:50:31 PM »

I stil have a bunch of cassettes all over the place. I also have a bunch of partial Musical Starstreams programs. I would start the program and then go to bed while recording the next 45 minutes. I would later listen to what I had missed. It's kind of fun to pull one out every once in awhile and relive the late '80's. I also have a bunch of my recordings on 4-tracks from my old Fostex 4-track.

ffcal · « **Reply #5 on:** February 05, 2011, 05:12:11 PM »

Back in the days of the walkman, it was fun putting together custom mix tapes for friends and for myself. It was also an easy way in the pre-internet days to communicate with other like-minded musicians with their funky bedroom (Porta-)studios. I remember responding to a "chain" letter cassette tape--you would send your music to the musician at the bottom of the list and forward the letter to several other musicians that you knew. I sent a cassette copy of my Some Brighter Stars LP to Mykel Board, the person at the bottom of my chain letter. He ended up reviewing it in a column for OP, which was unexpected and kind of cool.

Forrest

einstein36 · « **Reply #6 on:** February 05, 2011, 06:02:20 PM »

Man..isn't this kind of cool remembering the good old days of when things were much simpler and we had fun listening to music...

judd stephens · « **Reply #7 on:** February 05, 2011, 11:22:02 PM »

What was weird for me was I never purchased music until I started getting into new age and ambient, around 1990. That year my first cassette was the Hearts of Space "Universe" sampler, from the same year. From there my curiousity of those artists led me to Robert Rich's Rainforest and Roach and Rich's Strata. The sounds and the genre were still so young back then, listening to those tapes were pure magic. Later I remember playing a lot of Mickey Hart's At the Edge cassette, a nice mysterious mix of tribal & ambient influences.

Some other tapes I remember owning was Urban Dance Squad's Mental Floss for the Globe. My cousin had turned me on to the whole alternative and punk scene by then, and UDS was something of a groundbreaking band, I guess, as they were an early "rock-rap" fusion. I remember playing that on the ride while heading to Cincinnati with some of my friends to a Windham hill concert featuring Nightnoise

Some of them understood it. Another great cassette memory was just after highschool graduation. My parents bought me a train ticket to California to visit my relatives that summer. During the trip I had a cassette with one side a copy of Pearl Jam's "Ten", the other a copy of Nirvana's "Nevermind". This was the summer of '92, mind you.... I wore that tape out. 'Twere the days.

judd stephens · « **Reply #8 on:** February 05, 2011, 11:24:56 PM »

Quote from: hdibrell on February 05, 2011, 04:50:31 PM

I stil have a bunch of cassettes all over the place. I also have a bunch of partial Musical Starstreams programs. I would start the program and then go to bed while recording the next 45 minutes. I would later listen to what I had missed. It's kind of fun to pull one out every once in awhile and relive the late '80's. I also have a bunch of my recordings on 4-tracks from my old Fostex 4-track.

That reminds me of me. I did the same thing, with Echoes and a local spacemusic show on public radio called Soundscapes. (Nerd Alert)- I even wrote playlists...

presumably to investigate their music at a later date, no doubt.

LNerell · « **Reply #9 on:** February 07, 2011, 10:57:35 AM »

I probably have thousands of cassettes going back to the 1960s.

The cassette kind of became my gateway to audio recording, when I was a kid I use to have a little portable mono recorder and I would record everything I could think of. I still have probably the first field recording I ever made, of a cheesy marimba group in Guatamala in 1972. I use to love to make mix tapes, for driving around LA or for longer road trips. I never bought many albums on cassette, I would usually buy an LP or CD, then tape it for use in the car. But yeah, cassettes where great fun, I'm glad I got to enjoy them in their hay day.

Bill Binkelman · « **Reply #10 on:** February 07, 2011, 01:30:52 PM »

I have a number of genre-related cassettes, including a few HOS shows from back in the late 80s. Also, relatively rare stuff like The Way Home (Braheny), Lagoon (Nik Tyndall), Western Spaces (Burmer, Roach, Braheny), and a few more. I have a boombox if I feel like playing them. Ever since my falling out with S Hill (in 2000/2001), I haven't been able to muster up the nerve to listen to any of the old HOS tapes, though...just the sound of his voice and I feel creeped out. (Don't ask...). Anyway, I used to love scouring Cheapo (both Uptown and Snelling Ave.) for cassettes before I got my first CD player. My car only has a CD player, so it's the boombox or nothing. I have an old Technics dual well deck for my system, but the heads would need to be professionally cleaned and recalibrated, I'm betting.

Scott Raymond · « **Reply #11 on:** February 07, 2011, 04:31:33 PM »

In the early days, the only way an independent musician could get his music out there was to release it on cassette. I had a whole bunch of them from the late 80's into the mid 90's. A lot of these have never been reissued on CD. Loren Nerell's excellent Book of Alchemy and Point of Arrival albums, for example. Mine are now in the hands of Darren Bergstein, in the hope that one day they will get transferred to MP3. Though with his schedule, it's not likely that'll happen anytime soon.

I also had lots of listeners that would tape the show every Sunday. A few years back one of them sent me a box of tapes of old shows that were 10-15 years old. It was weird to hear my voice like that. I dumped those for reasons of space a while back.

Scott Raymond
WVKR-FM

mgriffin · « **Reply #12 on:** February 07, 2011, 04:34:03 PM »

I certainly listened to my share of music on cassettes (though more often mix tapes of my own making than store-bought ones). Still, it's a format I look back on without any nostalgia at all. Tape hiss, lack of direct access... sorry, cassettes suck.

einstein36 · « **Reply #13 on:** February 07, 2011, 05:03:50 PM »

Yeah..I definitely agree...but makes me wonder some of those lost gems of music albusm would or will we ever see them put on CD's or not or some other future media???

mgriffin · « **Reply #14 on:** February 07, 2011, 05:07:02 PM »

I definitely had plenty of vinyl that I was eager to find on CD, but I don't recall many cassettes that I held onto for lacking a CD equivalent. I think "The Name of This Band is the Talking Heads" might have been the last one.

hdibrell · « **Reply #15 on:** February 07, 2011, 05:24:55 PM »

I don't feel any particular fondness for the cassette in and of itself, but it does take me back to a time. You could record albums , mixes or radio shows on them and take them with you. Suddenly your music was portable.

Wayne Higgins · « **Reply #16 on:** February 08, 2011, 10:48:49 AM »

All my cassettes are collecting dust. Why don't I get rid of them? Lots of Bil Nelson, The Residents, and some really rare Negativeland tapes.

Joe R · « **Reply #17 on:** February 08, 2011, 03:17:53 PM »

I gladly got rid of all my cassettes years ago. I gave away the ones I could, and shit-canned the rest. I don't look back on them fondly at all-- tapes being eaten, bad sound, and that little felt pad behind the tape falling off. Grrrrr... I thought Columbia records made the worst ones of all.

And now, to my chagrin, I see they're making a comeback among some of these small-time ambient music operations. WHY?! Maybe we should bring the 8-track back too.

Joe R · « **Reply #18 on:** February 08, 2011, 03:22:36 PM »

Mike- I was really happy when "The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads" was finally released on CD.

einstein36 · « **Reply #19 on:** February 08, 2011, 06:45:33 PM »

but like Wayne has said...what about all of those old rare classics the studios are never going to re-release on cd or any other time for that matter in the future...
shoot..I say, put them up for sale at $500 a piece:)

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Author Topic: Cassette tapes.. (Read 10778 times)