Zines, Tapes & Freebies
I touched on some of the questions about which I am going to circuitously ramble today when I wrote about Thee Ludds and the tape label in Sheffield they’re working with called Tye Die Tapes. Specifically, I want to follow up a little on this paragraph, from the end of the post:
I am starting to see a lot of these garage bands gravitating towards labels who do a lot of tape releases, split releases, and stuff like that. It’s usually small scale and DIY, and quite a few rack up a fair few releases in this manner before going anywhere near an album. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I am not entirely certain where albums even fit in this aesthetic, actually.
It’s been this way in the States for a while but, within the bounds of the kind of music I’m into at least, it certainly seems that at the moment a lot of young folk in garage bands are not focussing on finding someone to release their albums, nor just slapping stuff up on the post-MySpace digital ventures and hurling it blindly out into the void, as I have heard so many journalists and bloggers complain in the past.
It seems like increasingly they are forming loose-knit communities based around tapes, maybe the odd 7″ and, oddly enough, zines and releasing their music on free EPs, tapes and splits, be they vinyl or cassette. In terms of resurrecting obsolete technology I find this kind of fascinating. But I like it.
It seems like an odd combination of digital and analogue sensibilities, too, which I also like. A lot of these labels are making rough DIY videos and using those and Bandcamp pages to get their music out to as wide an audience as possible.
They’re also recording a lot, which is an advantage of the digital era which I think is underappreciated. Recording is cheap and easy now – your songs can go from your living room to a fan in Kazakhstan in a couple of hours, and there is no real reason you need to have one, polished, definitive version of your songs anymore, an idea I think was unnecessarily reinforced when recording was expensive.
This was driven home to me during the PAWS Toad Session we recorded recently. The band talked a lot about allowing their fans to actually be able to watch the evolution of a song, from rough demo, to lo-fi band version to something recorded in a professional studio. In fact, they wondered why anyone would really care about a song without having some idea of where it had come from.
In fact, I think this is one of the reasons the passion for tapes has kicked off so much recently: they reacquaint people with the actual craft of making music. The initial explosion of MySpace and digital music in general was amazing, but it swiftly resulted in there being this infinite miasma of music out there, which got so thick it started to make our heads spin.
The rise in vinyl purchases seemed to reinforce the idea that digital music simply didn’t do enough for a lot of committed music fans. It was too plentiful, too nebulous, and too throwaway. They wanted something to ritualise their passion, and something which in some way symbolically represented it in the way an iTunes library never can.
Looking at these tapes and zine labels, I kind of get the impression that the same thing happened to a lot of musicians. Sure, they can record and release anything they want to now, but being in a band is a creative thing – it’s a craft – and that fact seemed to become increasingly lost in all the talk of viral marketing and Garage Band software. Besides, if you never actually do get signed, as most don’t, then having a website and some mp3s to show for all your blood, sweat and tears seems like a pretty poor return.
Looking at these tape labels, particularly those which include things like zines and, not infrequently self-designed t-shirts and dodgy homemade YouTube clips, they seem to be trying to reconnect with the actual craft of music. The recording and re-recording of songs seems designed to emphasise just how much work making a really good song can be – it’s not just about a mic, a MacBook and a MySpace page.
Vinyl is too expensive for some, but what’s the point in firing another anonymous mp3 out there into the void? If you’ve worked that hard on something, you need to show your work some respect, find some way of embodying what it means to you before you can really expect other people to allow it to mean something to them.
So these DIY musicians are sitting there dubbing their own tapes, one at a time, they are using photocopiers, glue and scissors to do their own design work and they are creating objects of care and of craft.
So you could say that they are simply rejecting the digital world in order to reacquaint themselves with a past (which is often wildly romanticised and in some cases they are too young to remember anyway) when music is supposed to have meant something more, and that’s fine, but I think it’s a little simplistic. This music is going on Bandcamp, the videos are being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, so they are still embracing many elements of the digital world. It’s not a Luddite movement.
In fact it seems to embrace the best of what the right combination of forward facing and backward facing technology can do for you these days.
And, if you want to explore some of these labels, here are a few I have been getting into recently:
Sways Records (Salford)
Comfortable on a Tightrope (Manchester)
Tye Die Tapes (Sheffield)
Gnar Tapes (Portland)
Night People (Iowa City)
Gerry Loves Records (Edinburgh)
Cath Records (Glasgow, but very new and yet to have any actual releases, I think)
And a couple recommended to me on Twitter:
Auris Apothecary
Scotch Tapes
Secret Furry Hole
Analog Edition
The Tapeworm
Loud and Quiet Cassettes
Tired Tapes
This takes me back to the early 1990s when I was indeed dubbing onto blank TDK D46s (perfect album length, see), pritt-sticking and letraset stencilling releases together for my tape label. It all went horribly out of fashion when cheap CD recorders arrived, and it was harder to sustain the tape thing when a generation of kids who didn’t actually know what a cassette was arrived on the scene!
But we had fun, made some absurd music along the way, and got to release some interesting bands from the overseas too (including Lambchop’s first ever UK release I might add).
But dubbing tapes takes forever…
Good points Mr Toad … I like this idea of rediscovering the craft of music. There are so many tools available these days that focus on repairing and perfecting that its really easy to lose sight of what makes something musical in the first place.
My last album project took 6 weeks to write and record, and at the end I just drew a line and said “fek it, finished – warts ‘n all”. It was a nice feeling and its kept it fresh for me, and even managed to rack up a bit of airplay. I’m even contemplating a limited cassette release if anyone can recommend a decent cheap duplicator who can do runs of 50 or so?
really enjoyed reading this.
itunes could kill music.
home taping* may yet save it.
*or something sort of like it.
I’m waiting for the point when releasing your music on MySpace becomes the hip, DIY and nostalgic way for bands to work.
On a serious note, while I appreciate the connection people feel with homemade cassettes and the like, it annoys me that people also seem to feel like having something as DIY automatically means it should be of lesser quality than more polished stuff.
The main reason technology is improving the DIY culture so much is that it’s becoming so much easier for those in the culture to compete with the higher ups and ‘professionals’ by making work which is of equal quality in every technical way, which has always been the biggest obstacle.
I’m not saying that the bands who make their own cassettes and stick to lo-fi recordings are doing this because they feel they need to stick to the DIY trend, of course not. It’s more about how annoying it is when people talk about DIY, they only focus on these kinds of bands, when there are plenty of bands recording their own music, making their own artwork, releasing their own videos and singles, who are also DIY. But because they don’t fit into the stereotype of being less-than-professional quality they seem to not be considered so any more.
In short, a lot of bands seem to suffer when they choose to make something look as nice and cool as possible, even though they’ve got all the same respectable aspects as the ‘DIY’ bands.
DIY is very much not the same as lo-fi, you are absolutely right. I had a whole bit written about how setting these things up in opposition to one another was entirely false, when there was a time and a place for demos, rough tape recordings and relatively high quality home recordings.
The pleasure I take from this kind of thing is a little different, though. It’s about people taking much more time than is necessary to add an element of love and attention to their music which is more than the mere recording, It’s kinda like making your own Christmas cards – utterly redundant in this day and age, but still miles nicer than getting something from Hallmark,
Where the fuck do these youngsters find tape decks these days? I haven’t owned one for 15 years. Does Sony still sell the Walkman?
It’s another genre thing, isn’t it? Hamish makes a good point, but this all about style. Just sticking something on a cassette isn’t going to interest twenty Wu Lyfe fans in Salford if it doesn’t fit the style parameters.
But the concept of myspace becoming a cool place again… probably happening right now and no less a good idea.
One distinct advantage of cassettes, though, (fashion aside) is the warmth of the sound. If you can’t afford to master to one inch tape the cassette is your next best option, with natural tape compression and distortion which doesn’t scrape a layer of hearing frequency from your lobes.
Well the kind of stuff I am listening to happens to be quite stylistically similar a lot of the time, but that doesn’t mean that the above points are entirely beholden to a particular type of music. Fence Records used to do this with their Picket Fence series, and other kinds of hand made CD-R, and achieved much the same thing.
C&B – that’s easy: eBay!
One distinct advantage of cassettes, though, (fashion aside) is the warmth of the sound.
Warmth of the sound? Cassettes? Warm like a freshly pinched-out turd, you mean? I’m sorry to be contrarian, but I’ve listened to thousands of cassettes in my time and I’m pretty sure they sound like shit. Perhaps it’s OK if the music is already filled with tinny hissing and warping, but otherwise….
@campfires etc ‘thousands’ of cassettes? And you’re only pretty sure? You should listen to at least another thousand more before you definitely make up your mind. Try ‘blank’ cassettes – you get the tinny hissing without having to listen to the naturally tape compressed music.
@Matthew eventually someone at Adele’s record company will no doubt think there should be a limited edition cassingle of her latest warble – they do that, record companies, ruin a perfectly good mini-craze by stamping their over-financed boot all over it.
In the meanwhile, the cassette just fits into the general swirling of vague hipsterism that includes PIxelvision, Super 8, overlaying VHS holiday footage of family holidays and Playbutton. Which is great! It’s not a criticism, just an observation. I like ironic enjoyment of vintage shit. I enjoy it ironically and un-ironically, too!
Jeez… cassettes.
I don’t really find it ironic. I mean, I am aware of the conscious vintageism, but I genuinely just enjoy the combination of slightly misplaced nostalgia with new stuff.
Shoe boxes full of cassettes, now that’s nostalgia.
On a slightly tangential note I’ve managed to completely ignore all previous mentions of Ghost Outfit on this website. This is possibly my greatest achievement of 2011,a simple search revealed that a partially sited almost deaf donkey would have been dancing around to their tunes by now.
If you wouldn’t mind Matthew a bit more of THESE ARE FUCKING ACE would be handy. Just in case anyone hasn’t seen the special release of their 7″ single with cassette and extra’s package..then THIS IS FUCKING ACE
http://swaysrecords.bigcartel.com/product/ghost-outfit-7-special-edition-inc-young-ghosts-ep
Hey Cogstar, know what? THEY REALLY ARE FUCKING ACE!
I’ve given my head a shake and I’m all sorted now thanks.
Tuesday is on repeat
Fair enough. Hundreds, not thousands. I’ve searched my conscience, and I now have to admit that I’m just pissed off because I sold my entire collection of cassettes in 1996 before a move, and I think I got maybe $100 for them. I had hundreds, I tell you! Hundreds! Great ones. And I loved them (even though they sounded sorta shitty)! And I let them go away! And now people want to listen to cassettes again and it makes me sad. I feel as Barry Manilow felt towards Mandy.
And you can always get a tape player for about a fiver on eBay.
[...] there’s tapes. I wrote a post recently expressing my excitement about the relatively recent abundance of tape labels in the UK. There was a little bit of a back and forth on Twitter about tapes recently, between [...]