There’s nothing quite like the lofi sound of degraded tape. The wow and flutter caused by the mechanics of the machine, the imperfections created by a tape that’s been played for years.
Ambient and experimental music has trended toward the sound of tape for a long time. One specific trend I find very interesting is tape loops.
In a tape loop, a section of magnetic tape is cut and spliced end-to-end, creating a circle or loop which can be played continuously, usually on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, making the sound repeat endlessly.
What a find! It’s tapes like this that really make me happy to do this. All of these wonderful little relics, memories long forgotten, telling the story of a person.
Side one starts out with a dictation where we learn quite a lot about this person.
Recorded on Friday March 14th
That day she went for a Harley ride with her neighbor, Jim Wagner
She and Jim went to a place called Ozark to get BBQ
Ozark was closed, so they went to JR Pawn Shop where she found something special that used to belong to her
So far I haven’t been able to find where Ozark or JR Pawn Shop were located. Maybe Birmingham Alabama, but I’m yet to find any conclusive evidence.
I had an absolute blast with this tape, not only because of the content, but because of the detective work finding who this person was.
In this sixteen and a half minute clip, a woman dictates a letter to what’s presumably an administrative assistant. This strongly worded letter is calling out the university over denying a promotion of a fellow professor that she feels deserves the promotion.
One of my latest microcassette lot purchases consists mostly of recorded lectures from an unknown college (maybe Yale). Each tape has the lecture name written on the label; greek, greek #2, hellenistic greek, greek 2nd, futurist, late hellenistic greek.
Most of the content on the six tapes is barely audible; a literal Charlie Brown’s teacher. I’m not sure how the person who owned these tapes got any good notes from the recordings.
I spend a fair amount of my freetime researching and experimenting with old technologies to find interesting sounds. While searching, I’ve stumbled across a corner of forgotten life; memories packed away, slowly degrading in basements and storage containers.
These beauties, microcassettes, with hours of dictation, random thoughts, answering machine messages, and candid slices of unscripted life, are all waiting to be listened to and shared.
March 18, 2025
