The Big Pink - Tapes

A format proposal for the Tapes compilation put together by The Big Pink for the K7 label. This takes 'Tapes' to its most literal conclusion yet it also uses the unplayable format to highlight how the majority of the compiled music doesn't even exist in a physical form. The package also attempts to create intrigue by secreting the information (download links, sleeve notes, etc) inside the spool-less cassette. The opening of the case with the supplied screwdriver forces the purchaser to invest effort and time into the download process culminating in a forced ritual aiming to heighten anticipation.

External text is laser-etched on card and internal text is printed on lightweight tracing paper. Initially there was a suggestion of incorporating a 'euro hole' for hanging the card as "product" but, later, it was felt that a more minimal approach captured some of the eeriness of the 'haunted' hypnotic tracks selected by The Big Pink's Milo Cordell. A key influence in the use of restrained aesthetic was Cordell's description of it as "the sound of America slowly dying" so, like some of the other deliverables for this semester's project, it tries to communicate a sense of 'the memorial'.


*Additional note: I should have mentioned that the dimensions of the pack was determined by the kind of media mail packaging that amazon uses for DVDs, books, etc. The hand-in will be presented in one of these. The additional layer is not just to post the item: it relates to Tal Brosh's comments about opening an item which, of course, influenced the deliverable itself.

Chubby Wolf - Ornitheology

Another one featured at the very good Hard Format.

Artist	Chubby Wolf
Title	Ornitheology
Label	Foxy Digitalis
Year	2010
Designer	HMSlatex
Music	Enveloping ambience (excerpt)
Notes	Chubby Wolf was the solo project of Celer’s Danielle Long. Ornitheology is part of Will Long’s series of posthumous releases of her work. The combination of dreamy music, soft latex and the cassette cover’s downturned face makes for a subtly unsettling experience. The design was commissioned by Danielle from the Parisian latex designers HMSlatex and it makes for another wonderful, unusual object that takes its place alongside Celer’s pyramids.

Formats

A parcel arrived today from the very helpful Alan at Tapeline. It contained an assortment of formats, cases and labels which I'll start experimenting with over the next couple of weeks.

Formats (continued)

I spoke to Will Bankhead (of Mo Wax and Honest Jons fame) via email this week. Aside from picking his brains about "the cultural value of specific formats" and other academic stuff relevant to this study, I was also keen to know where he gets his Trilogy Tapes releases manufactured. He passed on the contact and they've since said that they should be able to supply me with a few of their very nice products [see below]: even in the kind of miniscule numbers I need in order to start playing around. They also have a selection of CD and DVD packaging alternatives that might be good to experiment with.

Additionally, a mate works in a recording studio. Junglist Shy FX is currently busy there and, after some light badgering, the producer has said that he'll ask his manufacturer/distributor about whether I can get hold of some non-retail vinyl formats. I'm particularly interested in getting some unpressed vinyl while developing this idea of the 'blank' or unplayable format.

Sony Walkman

Cassette sales peaked in 1989 and that's undoubtedly thanks to the creation of the Sony Walkman ten years earlier. There's a great feature where an otherwise modern 13 year-old swaps his iPod for the Walkman for a week at BBC.co.uk ["It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape"].

It is interesting to see how people who have only ever really been used to smaller, digital devices view this previously ubiquitous player. This was once cutting-edge stuff:

"Every rap track has a reference to Sony, yeah! It's not a plug for them though, it's just that Sony and their Walkmans are such a massive influence and the Sony Boodo Khan is the ultimate portable sound experience: extra bass and a really huge sound... It's a totally obsessive object and if you have something that you're really into, you constantly think about it, so when I think about words and music I constantly think of my Boodo Khan, it's that simple."

Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack in interview, Jocks magazine, 1991

Why the music cassette has never died

From: The Times
Date: 18/12/09

Richard Goldsmith, of the upscale hi-fi geeksters’ paradise Audio Gold, dismisses the notion of a a dying format. “I’m not sure there’s any such thing,” he says. Cast your eye around his North London shop, and you can see why he might say such a thing. Walking past turntables and transistors that look like exhibits from a design museum, he shows me a cassette player priced at a bracing £450. It’s made by Nakamichi, who prided themselves on divining hitherto unimagined clarity from the humble C90

The best thing about it, though, is the way it changes tape sides. Through the Perspex window, you can see a mechanism, tantamount to a small robot hand, physically turn the tape around to start playing it. Goldsmith says he would be surprised if the machine is still here by the end of the week. They are, apparently, popular with middle-aged reggae fans.

Tempting as it is to herald the return of the cassette, it appears that the format introduced by Philips as a dictation aid in 1963 never quite went away. This week Island Records announced that sales of the 4,000 cassettes they decided to produce of Words for You had exceeded all expectations. HMV and the leading supermarkets have long since stopped selling tapes, but the album, on which celebrities such Joanna Lumley and Martin Shaw read poetry while classical music trills prettily along in the background, still managed to sell out on Amazon. By contrast, only 746 of the 200,000 copies of Words for You sold have been downloads. Thousands more cassettes are being manufactured in time for Christmas. “What’s exciting,” says an Island spokesman, Ian Brown, “is that we don’t know how big the market is because no one realised there was a demand.”

You can’t help feeling that this has been a howling great oversight. Having worked out that old people are one of the few age groups that will pay for music, Decca threw its weight behind We’ll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn and saw their efforts repaid with a No 1 record. How many more might they have sold if they had also put it out on tape? It’s tempting to smile indulgently at your silver-haired elders as they persist with their old Val Doonican cassettes. It may just be, however, that older people are privy to specialised knowledge that comes only with the passing of the decades. There are some environments in which the tape wins over all other formats.

As the iconically hip, left-of-leftfield guitarist of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore may be an unlikely bedfellow for the sort of septuagenarians who think Mpegs are what you hang your Mcoats on. But even during the CD’s early supremacy, Moore’s devotion to the cassette never wavered. Four years ago he published Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, a love letter to what he calls “the most personal of all formats”. Occasionally he produces limited-edition cassette runs of releases on his Ecstatic Peace label. “The cassette offers one of the great listening experiences,” he says. “That friction of the tape against the head is unbeatable. Then you’ve got the aesthetic difference. You find a mixtape that someone has made for you, and there is no mistaking the amount of care and affection that has gone into it.”

By any criteria, Moore’s obsession is extreme. He has thousands of meticulously filed CDs released on cottage-industry imprints with such names as Chocolate Monk and Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers — labels that equate the cassettes’ affordability and apparent obsolescence with their underground credentials. He is not alone. In Camden Market, the must-have accessory of 2009 was the bag designed to look like a cassette.

It’s all very well, but does this sort of loyalty have its basis in anything other than nostalgia? Not if a furious essay that appeared two weeks ago on the American music site Popmatters is anything to go by. Despite left-field releases by the likes of Dirty Projectors and Crystal Castles that sold out their cassette runs, Calum Marsh, author of Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture, insists that “at best, the cassette revival is merely a vacuous fad of no genuine value . . . at worst, a confused, cultural misstep more dangerous than most would care to admit”.

Might it not be that tapes offer something that subsequent technologies have failed to provide? Moore maintains that the CD is a vulnerable format that is designed to be re-bought. Anyone who has tried to keep CDs in a car — you might as well attack them with a cheese knife — must surely concur. On CDs the information is exposed. On cassettes it is protected by a plastic shell. The price of cassettes at my local charity shop — a can’t-give-them-away 20p a throw — suggests that, in the neophilia of the 21st century, these are considerations we may have simply forgotten about.

Since I started relieving Oxfam of their surplus, I have filled my car with albums by the Supremes, Van Morrison, James Brown and Talk Talk. Surprisingly, the cassette era even extends to relatively recent gems such as Radiohead’s Kid A. Better still, the foetal bass and padded cell production of that album’s highlights — Everything in its Right Place, Morning Bell — is perfectly suited to the warm, cocooned ambience of magnetic tape.

Of course, central to the lingering affection that people have for tapes is the fact that you could compile them yourself. “Home taping is killing music,” warned the skull and crossbones on the back of several major label releases in the early 1980s. I still have the first cassette of songs I ever recorded from the radio. Thirty years after I removed it from its case, my red ferric BASF C90 features excerpts from that Sunday night staple Star Choice, in which a celebrity of the day got to be DJ for a couple of hours. Separated only by inter-song banter from the Birmingham City star striker Trevor Francis are such hits as Chicago’s If You Leave Me and ELO’s Living Thing.

Victoria Hesketh, of Little Boots fame, is 16 years younger than me, but even she remembers sourcing her music by a similar means. “Oh, absolutely. You would sit by the tape recorder with your finger poised on the pause button because you’d want to catch it before the DJ started talking.” Take away the technologies of the era and such behaviour was no different from that of ten-year-olds illegally downloading the latest N-Dubz and Chipmunk hits to their computers. So why did it somehow not feel as wrong?

Moore thinks that the moral differential lies in the aesthetic merits of the two formats: “File sharing is utterly unsexy,” he says. “It takes no time at all to knock up a playlist from your iTunes folder and give it to someone.”

He surely has a point, and one that’s reflected in the monetary decline in the value of music. Everything to do with consuming music has become easier. In the past when you compiled a tape for someone, the time spent making it was central to its perceived value. You would also have a fairly good idea that each track followed on smoothly from the last one because the compilation would have been made in real time.

Moore compares DIY compilations to scrimshaws — pieces of whalebone on which voyaging sailors would make ornate carvings. “Sometimes I go to yard sales to buy cassettes compiled by people who are complete strangers to me. You see something that has ‘Marty’s Mix’ scrawled on it in ballpoint pen. You take it home and you don’t know if it’s going to be US post-punk hardcore or Kenny Rogers. Whatever it is, though, I know I’m getting a slice of someone’s life. Cassettes are the only format that can give you that.”

Sharing, Physicality, Mixtapes and Newspapers

By: Russell Davies
From: http://russelldavies.typepad.com/
Date: 23/06/10

My talk at Lift seemed to go down quite well but I remember leaving the stage thinking of all the things I'd meant to say; my own fault for trying to cram an hour of stuff into 20 minutes. So I thought I'd try and elaborate on some of it here. This post is what I meant to say while standing in front of this picture of one of Roo and Leila's tapes.

Earlier in the year I'd heard Clay Shirky talk at SXSW - it was an incredibly helpful set of thoughts and had me thinking about sharing and physical stuff in a way that hadn't occurred to me before.

He referred to Why We Cooperate and talked about three modes of sharing and why they're different.

Sharing Goods - the hardest to do, because if you give a physical good you no longer have it, you're deprived of it.

Sharing Services - like giving helping someone across the road - you don't lose out on physical stuff but it's an inconvenience.

Sharing Information - like giving someone directions - you don't lose stuff, it doesn't take much time, no inconvenience.

And, crucially, he points out, we're taught all the time that sharing is good. We get hits of pleasure when we share things with people. It's neurological and social. We like to share.

So when Napster came along and changed music sharing from a Sharing Goods process to a Sharing Information process we didn't all suddenly develop criminal tendencies. It's just that sharing, which we're inclined to do, suddenly became way more convenient. And as he said and someone twittered "We have a word for not sharing if there’s no cost to you: that word is ‘spiteful.'" The music industry is not battling against a generation of digital criminals, it's fighting a bunch of kids doing what their parents have been telling them since they were two - sharing nicely.

That, to me, was a hugely helpful and accurate framing of what's going on with sharing on the internet.

But it also got me thinking along a tangent.

While talking about Sharing Services Mr Shirky mentioned mixtapes - a way of sharing your music without giving away your records, but not very convenient to make, a sort of intermediate step on the way to Napster. But having just seen Shift Run Stop's tapes of their episodes (so, I guess, not strictly mixtapes) I immediately started thinking not about the inconvenience of a tape, but about their embedded value.

A mixtape is more valuable gift than a spotify playlist because of that embedded value, because everyone knows how much work they are, of the care you have to take, because there is only one. If it gets lost it's lost. Sharing physical goods is psychically harder than sharing information because goods are more valuable. And, therefore, presumably, the satisfactions of sharing them are greater. I bet there's some sort of neurological/evolutionary trick in there, physical things will always feel more valuable to us because that's what we're used to, that's what engages our senses. Even though ebooks are massively more convenient, usable and useful than paper ones, that lack of embodiedness nags away at us - telling us that this thing's not real, not proper, not of value. (And maybe we don't have the same effect with music because we're less used to having music engage so many of our senses. It's pretty unemboddied anyway.)

And that made me wonder if that's why people are liking Newspaper Club so much? Are we getting close to some sweet spot where you get the satisfactions of sharing a physical thing but with the convenience of sharing information. Is that what you can get when you add Digital Sharing Technologies to Physical Manifesting Technologies?

We're not there yet. We're probably only at Sharing Goods like Sharing Services but even that seems like a step forward. Maybe that's why making your own book feels so right, maybe that's where we need to go next with DataDecs, maybe that's what Shapeways and Ponoko will enable, but I think there's something in this.

Asportatio Acroamatis

Documented on his site http://heartlessmachine.com, Christopher Locke creates fossilized versions of electronic artefacts. He says:

"Most of these examples were discovered in the United States, although the various species are represented all over the world. It is sad, but most of these units lived very short lives. Most people attribute the shortened lifespan to aggressive predators or accelerated evolution, but this is not necessarily true. It has been shown recently that the true demise of most of these specimens came from runaway consumerism and wastefulness at the high end of the food chain."

The series includes museum-ready versions of the iPod, the Ghetto Blaster, the Walkman and the 8-track tape but the following is a particular favourite.

Asportatio Acroamatis
(commonly referred to as the Cassette Tape)

This species was first seen in the mid 1960s, but is not widespread until the 1970s. Similar to Repondecium antiquipotacium, it is thought that the compact disc lead to the decline in the Asportatio acroamatis population in the late 1990s. Asportatio has often been found in close proximity to Ambulephebus sonysymphonia, suggesting a close relationship between the two species.

Asportatio acroamatis is included in the surrounding matrix (stone base). Coloration varies from a light gray to reddish to brownish to a dark gray.

Barnbrook Mixtape 1988

From Jonathan Barnbook's blog:

"If you are of a certain age you will remember ‘the mixtape’ – a cassette tape you made with a personal selection of music. These amateur DJ efforts were for many purposes, sometimes to get a party going were you arrived at a very sober occasion and proclaimed you could liven up the place with the magic ingredient of ‘the best party mixtape ever (usually starting with James Brown's ‘Sex machine’ and following with a selection that wouldn't have been out of place at a bad wedding reception). Some mixtapes were to woo girls clearly showing ‘what a sensitive caring guy you were’; and you hoped that subliminally recording ‘please sleep with me’ in a whisper in the quiet bits of the tracks would guarantee you some kind of success with them. The final category were much more dark in intent; part of a wider evangelical mission you had to convert the whole world to the music and sub-culture you were almost religiously part of.

So, recently Richard Squires, an old college friend contacted Jonathan with some rather professional images of an example in the third category (thankfully), that Jonathan did for him when they were both at St.Martins in 1988. We don't think it is the most amazing piece of design he has done but they do serve to show the intensity of Jonathan as a student – that he was prepared to go to such design lengths to simply give a friend some music he liked, especially since he has has cited record covers as one of his biggest influenced on him becoming a graphic designer. Also on seeing this we are lamenting something human that has been lost in the iTunes playlist or Spotify link."

Hard Format

"It seems like everybody’s talking about the end of physical music
media. Who knows whether they’re right or not, but Hard Format is a
little place we’ve set up to celebrate our love of brilliant
music-related design. That means we’re going to focus on records, CDs,
cassettes and their like. However, Hard Format isn’t intended to become
a dusty museum devoted exclusively to past glories, though there’ll
certainly be some of that, we also want to highlight the brilliant new
design work being produced right now. In fact, we’re not setting
ourselves up to supply a canon of classic design - this is a place
where we record stuff we like, if you want yet another reproduction of
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band there are enough ‘Greatest
album covers of all time’ books out there already."

Hard Format is a collection and study of the design and art of physical music media and it's packaging. Not just another collection of album covers on the Internet, Hard Format embodies a love for the music-related design of CDs, cassettes and vinyl.

I specifically like the material that moves away from the supposed restrictions of the traditional format but then I can also recount how some of my own music purchases - such as Mo Wax and Spiritualized releases - would be a little annoying as they wouldn't be easily stored due to their increased size. Shop-bought CD racks, for example, never had the capacity for 'deluxe' editions.

Tape inserts

Considering past formats, there is a great selection of vintage blank tape inserts collected on Flickr here. Some interesting design aspects amongst them: specifically in terms of layout, logo, type, print and colourway.

Jamboxx for the iPad

A great find by Amy [thanks again!] in the iTunes App store. Developed by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, LLC "Jamboxx takes you back to the days of mixtapes and boom boxes with an 80s-inspired interface that'll get you nodding your head to the beat in no time".

Tapes

I previously completed a project based around club/electronic music that referenced the vinyl 12" single throughout. The use of records was to anchor the project to DJ culture and, initially, I felt that this particular project might also want to take some inspiration from the format. Certainly, visual clues have been taken from sleeves from the specific genres/eras to inform the design outcomes. However, after considering the importance of pirate radio to the music forms that make up Reynolds' Hardcore Continuum, I considered what might be the preferred formats for end users. And while vinyl has long had cult status and 'muso' appeal, the widespread and possibly more 'democratic' format has to be the humble tape cassette.

The cassette is interesting in terms of its ability to capture the more spontaneous aspects of individual scenes: radio transmissions and DJ club sets. In fact, the inexpensive copying of these contributed to an increased distribution network for the discussed sounds. So while a London pirate radio station might only be received within the capital, broadcasts could reach even wider audiences once recorded and exchanged. As for DJ sets, the black market for seamless mixes of the scene's more popular disc jockeys grew to such an extent during the early 1990s that record labels began to produce their own, officially licensed versions to capitalise on this interest.

What is interesting now is just how the cassette has recently been embraced as a cult format. For younger listeners it is perhaps a curiosity due to both the increased rarity of tape players and what is generally poor sound quality. For older individuals, it will have nostalgic associations with youth plus an interactive, DIY aesthetic that long preceded the internet. Perhaps if you look closely enough, you can see the blueprint for Spotify encased in a TDK C-90. Elsewhere on the web, you will still find many MP3s labelled as 'mixtapes'. So there is, I think it's fair to say, a real cultural legacy here. And one that isn't exactly being ignored in 2010.










While the above examples [respectively a Nano case, a USB hub and a storage device] are simply borrowing an iconic form, others have reverted to the cassette for its original purpose.

Will Bankhead created some great packaging alongside Ben Drury for the Mo Wax label but has more recently switched attention to his The Trilogy Tapes endeavour. In addition to carrying out some enviable work for other music clients, he issues cassettes compiled by a selection of interesting people. A couple have been put together by Salford resident Dan Dwayre a.k.a. Black Lodge.

Anyway, I'm considering using the format of the tape in some way as part of my deliverable. I think that there are a number of aspects to it that could be explored and exploited in a creative way.