“I'll be in my room, making no noise and pretending that I don't exist.”

September 9, 2012 1:55 PM

this website is a collection of underground / independantly released cassette tapes from the days when the audio cassette was the standard method of music sharing, generally the mid eighties through early nineties. material represented includes tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indy, rock, diy, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials... most of what you are about to hear is rather difficult to file under any one category, and thus has not been.

Wikipedia on Noise Music...

posted by artof.mulata (10 comments total)

Awesome shit. Found some nice Donald Miller for starters.
posted by idiopath at 2:01 PM on September 9, 2012

This is a fantastic collection. Thanks for posting this!
posted by hanoixan at 2:13 PM on September 9, 2012

I'll have you know the teenage me is fatally overdosing on pure pleasure and reward right now. I so often dreamed of having a resource like this in the early '90s.
posted by idiopath at 2:14 PM on September 9, 2012

Squee!
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:25 PM on September 9, 2012

I'ts like the tape section in the old Ozone Records that used to be across the street from Powells where I bought a Merzbow tape (Nil Vagina Tape Loops pt. 2) and put it in my walkman and blissed out while browsing the zine section and I ripped a page out that had some porn (I wasn't old enough to buy porn) while hiding in the bathroom and while I was doing that my walkman got stolen and so I immediately bought another copy of the merzbow tape and went home and just went into a trance....
posted by idiopath at 2:28 PM on September 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

Thanks for this! Seems an appropriate place to post a link to the International Sound Communication (ISC) series of cassettes. Some cool stuff there.
posted by carter at 2:32 PM on September 9, 2012

Wow - I'm there. I recorded as Patience Worth way back when. My stuff is here. Check out "Junk" for some supreme audio weirdness.
posted by davebush at 2:49 PM on September 9, 2012 [6 favorites]

item: you can digitize a 4 track with a standard tape deck: tracks 1+3 will be on one side and 2+4 on the other iirc - 2+4 need to be reversed and then lined up, but thanks to track bleed through you should be able to line them up pretty easily
posted by idiopath at 2:58 PM on September 9, 2012

The more I listen to this, the more I realize that I miss that 2 seconds of NOTHING which comprised the non-magnetized leader, and then the first bits of magnetic tape before the first track starts, which is the promise of SOMETHING.

Makes me salivate each time.
posted by hanoixan at 3:23 PM on September 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

Great find. Thanks, artof.mulata.
posted by homunculus at 11:55 AM on September 10, 2012