Kerry is a babe #

This past weekend my wife and I went to a market event where I picked up a great mixtape.

The tape required fixing a previous repair job that kept the tape from rewinding or playing past the massive hunk of tape.

The quality is shit, but A for effort #

The recording is very tinny and in several places almost difficult to listen to at normal volumes. The songs lack dynamic range, but I don’t think it’s from the tape itself. This specific model and manufacturing year of Maxell is highly regarded by modern tape scholars (tapeheads, as they cleverly call themselves). Since the sound is fairly consistently thin for each of the songs, I imagine Scott recorded this tape using a handheld recorder in front of his stereo speakers.

Estate sales are sad #

A couple weeks ago my wife and I were driving to an errand and noticed several signs advertising an estate sale. Without much thought we looked at each other and both said, why not? I’d never been to one and didn’t know what to expect.

As we walked through each room in the house it was clear a couple had lived there. There was an antique doll collection, men’s and women’s coats, shoes, and boots. In the basement there were several old tools, typewriters, and several parts for small electronics repair. There were some really neat antiques like an old wash basin and washing vanity. A red “world’s best grandpa” hat hung on the wall. These people were loved.

A constant battle #

As a creative person I regularly find myself at odds with perfectionism. Sometimes it looks like researching an idea for months to ultimately park it on the shelf. Sometimes, but not often, I get the courage to just push in and try, for better or worse, regardless of the potential for failure.

Although completely rewarding, extracting and archiving long forgotten microcassette recordings was always a side tangent to a different goal, making microcassette tape loops.

The old sound is the new sound #

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.

...

Relics of an interesting person #

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.

The Mark of quality #

This is the tape that got me started down the trail of listening to tapes.

There’s an almost voyeuristic quality listening to this, like I’m not supposed to be listening to someone’s voicemails, but especially this one.

We start off like you’d expect with voicemail messages.

“Mark, if you’re there pick up the phone. Hello? Alright bye.”

“Mark. (click beep)”

...

A strongly worded letter #

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.

Gold amongst a lot of noise #

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.

A new hobby #

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.

An intro of sorts #

Well, here we go again. I’ve started and retired more blogs than I can remember, and honestly, apart from my Appalachian Trail content, there really isn’t much I wish I still had.

Here you’ll find posts about my several hobbies, new projects I’m working on, political and business ramblings, and random stuff I enjoy.