I haven’t seen one of these in ages, but in unearthing loads of old cassettes you can find some real treasures. This is a TDK Metal tape with an aluminum body. A great find, and I think they were pretty expensive when they first came out.
It was last weekend and I missed it completely. Which is a real shame for me. So, to make it up to myself I thought I’d post a few of my favourite cassette pictures.
Since I started going back over my old tapes and retrieving them I’ve been thinking about the process of recording to tape, or if not to tape in a linear way and not wholly sequenced.
I liked that way of doing things in the past. There was more room for error and because of that more room for inspired accidents. I miss that. You just don’t get that so much with sequencing.
So I am giving serious consideration to tape again. I might even consider getting a tape 8 track at some point!
I checked the tapedeck site to see if they had one of these in the list of cassettes and they don’t, so I sent them some photos.
I have 3 of these Teac cassettes and I can remember that when I bought them that they were pretty hard to get hold of back then. Now, well I doubt that there would be many of them around any more.
I’ve only got one of the blue ones and the other two are black and not in as good condition.
When I was about 11 or maybe 12 I really desperately wanted a tape recorder, and for Christmas I got one. It was a fergusson and it looked like this. I found it again at a very weird museum a few weeks ago. It took me right back. I used to use it for recording…
I had one of these years ago. In fact, I had a number of these. But one that was very like this one. I think it was the Ferguson that was almost identical to this. It was excellent. Ok, not excellent, but really good for its time. I used it to record all sorts of…
I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently going through a process of moving all my old cassettes to digital. It will take a long, long, long, time. I assure you.
But part of the process is listening to music I haven’t heard in years. Mostly things I’ve recorded myself, some great, some terrible, some embarrassing, and all enjoyable in one way or another.
It is a good reminder of why I love music, why I love the creative process. A reminder that software and hardware are just tools for doing something creative and should be looked at as that.
I think it can be really easy to get lost in tools you’re using to the point where you focus so much on what the tool can do and can’t do that you forget what it is you’re trying to achieve. That’s the danger and listening to my old stuff made with simple hardware and usually no software at all made me realise that perhaps I need to think long and hard about where my music is going, or more importantly the fact that it isn’t going anywhere at the moment.
I already have this album, I got it when it first came out, but when I heard that Steve Jansen was selling off the last remaining stock and signing them I thought I ought to buy it again. It’s always lovely to have a signed copy of things and this album especially so. I hope…
With a band name like that I could do nothing else but listen to them. I remember the days of using cassette libraries and borrowing tapes. All too often the tapes would be somewhat damaged and wobbly, but that was in many ways the nature of cassettes themselves. Of course cassette libraries are all but…
I found this tape the other day when I was clearing out old cassettes (a job that’s going to take me a while I think).
I’d forgotten I even had this, so it is great to listen to Laurie Anderson as I’ve been a fan for many years now, and interesting to hear her talk about her work in the present tense from so long ago.
I’ve been wanting to see this film for ages now so when it came up at the Tate Modern I was really pleased. But when I got there the added bonus was she was there too. Which was amazing. She gave a little talk at the beginning and then answered questions at the end. It…
I’ve been clearing out old tapes, and when I say old I mean old. Some of the tapes are of my own music so I’ve been converting a few tracks to digital and finding songs that I’d completely forgotten about.
Sadly, one tape seems to have decided to give up and of course it had to be one which had lots of long forgotten treasure (for me anyway).
There’s only one thing for it. I’m going to have to open it up and see if I can splice the tape together, and I haven’t done that for years!
I used to have a Fostex X-15, but when it finally gave up I got rid of it. So I got the X-14 to replace it. It’s not as good. It’s ok, but it isn’t the same. Even so, I do like these old cassette 4 tracks. Their kind of awesome.
I am Ashley Elsdon 