so, i come up in the cassette time. like when my older brother came home with chuck berry, or skip james records when we was young, or they played a REALLY good country song on the radio, the music would be put on tape to be repeatedly enjoyed later. or if i borrowed a killer banjo record from tom ludwick {this local cat that had a big pile of bluegrass records}, i’d tape it of course.
 
in my later adult life, there were these legendary tapes that were kind of circulating {nationally and/or regionally}. metal ones, joke ones, really strange ones.
{i think the first bad brains was on tape.} sometimes they would be cryptically labeled or something and there would be no information on them other than a title, or maybe a doodle. tapes were cool cuz like with a record you could see how long all the songs were and how many were on a side you can even tell how loud/bassy something is by looking at the groove, but tapes were kinda mysterious. and reusable. and those little reels were spinning around. and if you played it again it was slightly different because it would wow/flutter in a slightly different place and would have shed a minute bit of oxide from previous run.{veil} and if you played it in a different jam box or car, it sounded slightly different. and you could stick them in your pocket. the music i was/am into: dub, bluegrass, punk rock, actual country music, and metal sounds really good on that format. i still like to check mixes by whupping them onto tape. usually kinda hot, high bias.
 
one of the epic tapes from the van days was from my friend steve mannion up in NJ. he made this really strange 4 track masterpiece that is the funniest most amazing punk rock thing ever been made. i don’t think hardly anybody ever heard it but just a few friends. {the bad livers made many a late night drive across thousands of miles of highway while listening to this type stuff ha.} it may have originally appeared as a cdr, but it was quickly taped.
 
so one of my dreams was to put it out on my own weirdo cassette label so, years later i kinda started one, got the tracks and eventually got it put out by him. just the moment of discovery with that thing is unbelievable. the moment when you go through the arc of “this is kinda weird, hey cool….what IS this???? man this is the greatest thing i’ve ever HEARD!!!!” 
 
ah yes the tarot of the old aristotelean catharsis. i’ll take two!
 
in a sense the art that i get into the most is kinda like that. in my system, the music/image should be slightly veiled. especially certain parts of what’s happening. details can only be perfect in one way, but they can be slightly off in millions of ways. i find great interest in this. 
 
 
the experience i’m having right now is that the best stuff has to proceed somehow from zero, or has to have some zero in it. if everything{even the execution} is all wide open, you get burnt out on it due to dataoverload, and things of that nature. therefore, minimalism is mostly a valid statement in an overly/needlessly complex localized being context, because it provides a zero. {that’s kinda of an axiom i’m working off of that i think i made up?} i really like zero in my personal space/physical reality too come to think of it. random events arise out of nothingness. sometimes the coolest stuff comes out of less choices rather than more.
 
steve made all this stuff just himself voicing various characters in the narrative. come to think of it, he’s currently enjoying life as a very talented comic book artist, and perhaps this tape of his was like a comic book, he sort of treated the songs as chapters, or frozen moments or whatever. the way comic book story lines move along one chunk at a time. whatever the deal was, he made it and it was legendary. and if the bad livers woulda thought you was really really really cool, you prolly woulda got a copy of that tape. but prolly not cuz prolly nobody except zippy up in kansas or something would qualify, but he would have already had it trying to give it to you or something. richie from agony column. it was a pretty select list. it still is. 
 
as you can see, it meant a lot to me to put it out. and my little label that i run out of my kitchen, well technically it’s the dining room, became home to a lot of my stranger output, and some of my friends’ kinda weirdo stuff. most of the runs were/are 100 tapes only. 
 
see, one of the many side benefits of releasing cassette material in this current linear time coordinate, is the only folks that will even pick it up are total music freaks. there’s that kinda veil mentioned earlier. the coolest stuff kinda gives a casual listener lots of places to jump off the boat in order to let them go ‘head and get up and split. of course at some point you have to make a sandwich but that’s a whole other can of night crawlers.
 
my sort of early life cortical programming was from the aesthetic of where the platonic ideal form was to drive a ratty truck but have the best motorcycle you can afford. so in some sort of seeming result of that, it would appear there’s quite a few folks that drive older cars/trucks and lots of them have working tape decks and it’s pretty funny to put out music for that. 
 
 
which is not to say any format is better than another or any of that, if the music isn’t interesting, high resolution won’t help it. i’m referring here to being excited about music in a general way, and the type of energy where if you found something you particularly liked, you would subsequently search out the label, producer, musicians, gear, writers, studio and research every lateral aspect that would appear. then work the same process on all those new {to you}recordings you just unearthed. and repeat till the living end. that’s kinda how people find my work. if you know my stuff at all you have to be the kind of person that digs around because there’s no other way to find that type stuff.