This is the first of many cassettes that fall in my " I need to OCR this non-Western script" category. I can tell this is in Chinese, but no idea on whether it's Mandarin or Cantonese. Likewise, I'd assume it's from either Hong Kong or Taiwan, but that's mostly stemming from the fact that it dates from 1979. There are Roman characters indicating it is in stereo and item "SK-1012" of this particular music label. On the outside it has great j-card design and on the inside is a no-frills cassette shell that's held up nicely.
Really dig this tape overall, the music is lounge-y, instrumental goodness. An electric organ leads the way, sounding very akin to the wonderfully colorful and cheesey home organs companies like Hammond and Kimball made in the 1960s and 1970s. The built-in drum machine percussion forms the backing for most of the tracks, and the melodies sound like renditions of traditional Chinese music, or at least closely emulating that style. Because of this it has a remarkably similar vibe to classic 1950s and 1960s exotica. If there's ever been a tape that demands a Mai Tai in your hand as you give it a listen, it's surely this one.
Country: Unknown (likely Taiwan or Hong Kong)
Label: Unknown (will update upon further research/translation)
Case: Norelco
J-card: Cardstock, one-sided
C-45 Type I
Actual run-time: 22 minutes per side, Side B had only 19 minutes of audio content.
"Folk music from the Andes" is the best description I find searching for information on this cassette, and I'm afraid I don't have much to add. J-card only has a band picture and track-listing. Later albums attributed to Mashicuna from 1986 onward indicate they play folk music from the Andes (specifically Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), but with no indication on where the group is from specifically. Adding to the confusion, there seems to be a solo act by the name, as documented on youtube, and likewise "Mashicuna" is a track title on similar albums.
Only documented existence on this particular release was found here and I wonder if it was their debut, or least an early recording the group sold at performances overseas, specifically to the ever reliant niche of world music listeners in the U.S. and Europe.
This is lively tape, I like it even though it's probably, well, a Peruvian pan flute band. It's a bit compromised by the condition of the tape: stereo sounds iffy throughout, and side a kicks off with some wow-and-flutter. But playback is good in the middle and still very listenable, just weathered, something apt for bumpy road trip on the way to Machu Picchu.
Gamelan ensemble music at it's finest, specifically gamelan degung of West Java, purchased sometime in 1988 based on information found in the case. Compared to other gamelan recordings I've heard (full disclosure - I am not an expert) this has a more deliberate and percussive sound to it, less dense and droning but still "shimmery" in sound, likely do to the fact that it's a smaller ensemble. It's a lovely recording, with a suling flute playing over intricate percussion. There's a reflective, melancholy vibe for me personally, reminding me immediately of the song "Same Dream China" by Gold Panda, who has notably drawn from world music and found sound.
I could not find this particular cassette release online, but some research shows it's been reissued various times on CD, including different artwork, being a popular album for locals and tourists alike. Dian Records seems quite prolific, with examples appearing on ebay and blogs, though their discography seems only partially documented on Western sites.
The actual musicians are credited as "Gapura" who are cited elsewhere as Group Gapura and Grup Gapura, the latter link mentioning this very cassette, the former being the only release of theirs released in the U.S. The BASF tape used has held up well, very little hiss and great fidelity overall.
The packaging is unusual, and was a doozy to scan - it's not a Norelco case but a durable solid plastic case resembling the VHS cases Disney used in the 90s. It appears to be popular method in South Asia - the other tapes I've seen with it are from India. I figure that because these tapes were mostly played in outdoor boomboxes and car players, it's a far more apt case style.
"Tropical Rain Forest" is the rawest and least dressed-up of the many 'sounds of nature; tapes in my collection. Unlike most other releases of the same niche, there's no coupling of touched up field recordings with peaceful, meandering musical passages of piano. fact the first side kicks off with some kind of primate howl, and the rest of 30 minutes consist of an orchestra of mating calls, bird chirps and various deep jungle noises. In fact, I can only assume it's a barely edited field recording. This is quite neat, making it stand out from the usual studio produced affair of artificial and clean forest ambiance.
Unfortunately information of this is slim. I have no idea who actually made the recording or whether or not it was licensed elsewhere (though I believe it was, probably with midi pan flutes dubbed over). It was put out by Silver Bells Music, a defunct affiliate of Nashville publisher Thomas Nelson, which mostly produces biblical-related books and media. Back in the late 80s they dabbled in World and New Age music market (to their defense, just about everyone did) and this is clearly a byproduct of that effort. There seems to be a CD copy on Amazon.com from 1993, and I deduce this mostly because a 1-star review said "This almost is identical to the one I was looking for (rain with pan flute and harp) but the copy I had in the past didn't have all these screaming monkeys on it."
The tape says 'same on both sides' but side b clearly begins with a completely different monkey ranting about something different altogether. My guess is the tapes were dubbed off a loop without any proper start/stop, so the content is the same but the tapes begin at different points.
Odd tape overall. Can't be for relaxing nor meditation - I doubt anyone can quickly falling asleep to the real cacophonous beauty of the rain forest. It's not clearly documented as an environmental recording.
Maybe it's like those Halloween 'spooky sounds' tapes, but for like, I dunno, Jurassic Park themed parties. Yeah I bet that's it.
A striking black and white photograph of a man with long black hair stares at me. Who is this? A young Tommy Wiseau? A Norwegian black metal legend sans make-up? Did Brandon Lee put out an album I wasn't aware of?
No, it's a dude named Julian Silversuit who, at some point in the 1996, recorded this four song demo tape in Houston, TX. While made in the era of alternative rock and then emerging post-grunge, this demo encapsulates pop rock of the 80s, an era of trends like glam metal and hard rock, genres that are best known for their ironically "soft" power ballads.
Two original songs and two covers make up the EP, trading off from straight-forward rock that wouldn't sound out of place at the end of Top Gun and/or adapted to Street Fighter ("If I had A Girl..."/"Looking For Love") and between two slower ballads ("Tears of Joy"/"He Don't Know You"). The ballads feature sax and piano solos and place Julian's vocals at the forefront. He's a actually a decent singer, I can't help but compare him to Meatloaf, with whom he shares a unrestrained, quasi-operatic style. Similarly, the lyrics are anything but subtle, opening with "If I had a girl like you / I'd shoot myself, I'd shooot myself." Yep, no minced words here.
For a demo tape, this is well-recorded, duplicated onto a type II cassetted and recorded by engineer/mixer Rock Romano, the only person credited who I could track down online. Most would conclude this oozes of cheesiness, and I'd be hard-pressed to argue that point, but I think it's endearing too. I have no idea how many times I repeated the last few seconds of the tape, which concludes with this epic delivery of these lyrics: "-I swear he's never known the ways of luh-uuuve-ah" So wherever you are Julian Silversuit, a sincere thank you, I got a kick out of this tape.
One of many Vietnamese pop cassettes I've found in North Austin and Round Rock is this compilation entitled Hung Ho, #111 in the Làng Văn catalog. I've gathered that few, if any, of these are from Vietnam directly, but instead produced by Vietnamese expatriates. Làng Văn is one such label, founded in 1985 in Orange County, California. The label is still very active, although I can't seem to track down any list of their older discography and this is most likely out-of-print. I picked this one first for digitizing because of it's eye-catching purple j-card and the convenient fact that much of it is written with western script.
Hung Ho appears to be a sampler of then upcoming releases on the label, some of the more prominent Vietnamese-American pop singers are on here, including the late Ngọc Lan and Hương Lan. The former was "known for covering nostalgic French-language pop hits of the 1970s." Most of the tracks are ballads, poppy but not exactly upbeat; no bubblegum pop or dance singles on this tape. There's clear sense of sentimentalism in these songs, parallels to Enka music immediately come to mind. With the context of post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora considered, the source of the nostalgic, melancholy tones of these songs are quite obvious. Makes for odd juxtaposition to the valley girl-esque glamour shots on the cover, which clearly screams late 80s American pop culture.
I love Pink Floyd. Considering my dad would often recite this with a flawless impersonation and strum "Wish You Were Here" on guitar, I've been a Pink Floyd fan my entire life. So while I usually avoid used major label tapes, I didn't hesitate when I picked up a cassette copy of Wish You Were Here, especially with it's alternative cover to the CD release I've had for years.
My first listen revealed how bizarre this cassette was. Now to preface the initial confusion: I was using my Sony dual deck that allows both A and B playback, so I wasn't sure which side I was playing immediately. I simply rewound it to the nearest start and pressed play. I casually listened to the tape on headphones, beginning to wonder if it was a bad copy because of the muffled playback. The droning intro also lasted much longer than I expected, so I fast-forwarded, turned up the volume, and listened again, flipping to the other side as well to get an idea of which track was playing. It then dawned on me that it wasn't poor quality, it was backwards!
I admit I was a bit freaked out initially. I've been fascinated by backmasking for a long time, well aware of the many documented examples of it being used. Wish You Were Here is not one of them. Furthermore, this was a seemingly unaltered commercial release, not a homemade tape, therefore not a product of some hypothetical black magic dubbing session. My fears subsided when I realized my cassette deck didn't show the following signs of possession:
Catching on fire
Spitting my cassette out
Oozing pea soup from the RCA outlets
Flashing '666' on the counter
After letting the tape play out, I promptly exorcised it and buried it under concrete, in order to avoid this from occurring:
Ok, not really, in fact I forgot about it for awhile. With the blog in mind I digitized the tape a couple days ago, confirming a very simple explanation for what actually occurred. The tape reel inside became twisted, essentially flipping most of the magnetic tape wrong-side out, explaining both the backwards playback and muffled sound (since the tapehead is reading oxide on the opposite side instead of the near side). Two very detailed and informed explanations can be found in this Audiokarma thread and in the last paragraph of this webpage.
The clue in the faulty recording is the beginning of what is mostly Side A. "Have a Cigar" begins playing normally until 3:00, when it fades out, replaced by the ending of "Welcome To The Machine" commencing backwards. This is followed by "Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I–V" backwards. Side B begins with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts VI-IX" backwards, followed by the title track backwards, then transitioning into the remainder of "Have A Cigar," which is now backmasked. Finally, a jarring switch to the tail-end of "Welcome To The Machine" occurs. From 21:00 onward there's just tape hiss, but if you listen carefully you can faintly hear "Have a Cigar" playing a 3rd time, again backwards. This makes sense though - it's Side A bleeding through the recording, returning full circle.
So to sum up the new tracklist:
Side A:
3 minutes of "Have A Cigar" (normal)
Most of "Welcome To The Machine" (backwards)
"Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I–V" (backwards)
Side B:
"Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts VI-IX" (backwards)
"Wish You Were Here" (backwards)
Remainder of "Have A Cigar" (backwards)
End of "Welcome To The Machine" (normal)
(tape hiss with Side A bleeding through faintly)
Conclusion? The tape is either a factory dud or at some point the reel became twisted around and mistimed at the beginning and end of each side. No more mystery, but on the upside it's safe to say few albums would sound cooler backmasked than than Wish You Were Here. It's a happy [freakish] accident!
Country: U.S.A.
Label: CBS/Columbia
Case: Norelco w/ black base
J-card: Original label j-card
(C-47) Type I
Actual run time: approx 23:20 per side
Editing notes: Normalized to -0.3 db, despite backwards and mistimed playback, this is still one of the better tapes I've recorded. Left/right balance was perfect, no wow-and-flutter nor excessive tape hiss.
Another find in a Austin area thrift store, along with a few other Cyrillic inscribed tapes from the Eastern Bloc. While I'm fairly good at finding context clues, this particular cassette, with it's red color scheme, clearly written date, and hand-drawn hammer & sickles, was a clearly a no-brainer. As with the rest of the world, tapes were a fixture in the Soviet Union throughout the 80s. Cassette players were manufactured domestically, often resembling American and Japanese Walkmans and boom-boxes. Both mainstream commercial and underground music was dubbed and distributed, only in Soviet Union...tapes mix you!*
Unfortunately, I have no idea who is on this tape, as translating it myself would be time-consuming. I did immediately notice that the tape has an identical "bumper" at the beginning of each side, some sort of melody repeated twice in left and right channels (to prove it's in stereo perhaps?), then a cheesy explosion sound effect, followed by an announcement and a snippet of a song. Perhaps some sort of trademark on the part of the dubber? Tracks are consistently spaced out as well. The recording itself is a bit rough but not terrible. The cassette used is a Kontak C-60, a common brand of the era. Like many other Soviet blank tapes, the graphic design is quite nice: basic colors, simple designs. Not at all a major depature from Maxells and TDKs of the era. It's a straight copy of Western design: no-frills, cheap and seemingly reliable, but not remotely great by any means (i.e. Soviet tech in a nutshell).
Both sides consist of uptempo rock songs, all male vocalists and for the most pop-oriented or soft rock. There are couple "Springsteen-esque" ballads in there as well, but nothing slow or melancholy. Lot of it sounds self-aware of it's own silliness (track at 19:10 on Side-2 kicks off with an amazing quasi-jazzy MIDI keyboard rendition of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March"). I'm assuming this is a late 80s mixtape of VIA pop artists and late 80's Russian Rock bands. Based off that, it's likely a bootleg or personal dub copy of "state-friendly" music instead of say, a underground mixtape. No noisy, rough post-punk or metal tracks here. The last 5 minutes of Side 1 consist of some slick synth-pop dance music but, to my disappointment, cuts out shortly after. Fun tape overall, would make for make for a great standby mixtape for a weekend drive, especially in a Lada with the windows rolled down.
*(I am so so sorry, I couldn't resist the temptation)
Country: U.S.S.R.
Label: N/A (homemade mixtape)
Case: Norelco w/ black base
J-card: original Kontak j-card, tracklist and title info filled out (along with 3 hammer & sickle doodles)
C-60 Type I: black Kontak MK 60●5
Actual run time: 30:40 per side
Editing notes: Normalized to -0.3 db, right channel dropped out from 27:20 to 27:40 on Side-1, this was converted to mono for mp3 copy. Further playback confirmed error is part of the original dubbing.
Narada, along with Windham Hill, are the most frequent new age labels I've come across in my tape finds, both serving as flag-bearers of the genre in the 80s and 90s. This neat little mixtape is my first upload of a Narada release. Musically it's safe and chill: lot of keyboards, flutes, guitar flourishes, etc. Not disposable muzak or soulless jazz at all, but nothing really deep either, lot of it is akin to pleasant waiting room music or early 90s corporate soundtracks: prime vaporwave fodder.
Narada Productions began in 1983 and still exists today, but since the early 2000s has essentially become a contemporary jazz imprint. This mixtape was dubbed during the height of the label's existence, a homemade copy of a 1991 compilation. I love the custom j-card artwork, it's vastly superior to the original cover. Every tiny detail screams 90s aesthetics: the Southwest coyote howling at the moon motif (note scarf), soft pastel colors of turquoise, pink and orange, and hell, they even used a muted beige backdrop. This tape wouldn't off been out of place in a Sante Fe gift shop, in the cassette deck of a Pontiac Fiero...or well, in any of these rooms.
Country: U.S.
Label: N/A (homemade mixtape)
Case: Norelco
J-card: color print on regular paper, single fold
C-90 Type I: clear TDK D90 series
Actual run-time: A-side - 33:42, B-side - 43:08
Editing notes: Silence at beginning and end removed, normalized to -0.3 db
The inaugural entry of Tape Escape! is appropriately enough one of my favorite tapes in possession: a new age gem by the late Jaxon Crow (aka James R. McLaughlin, Jr.) who resided in Dallas, Texas. Being a fan of all types of ambient music, past and present, it is easily the tape I've been most eager to share.Just finding it alone was quite a blessing in retrospect, this was sitting in a pile of second-hand tapes at an Austin area Goodwill a year or so ago. I bought it based off curiosity and a overall good vibe, much of which was given off by j-card artwork, which is uniquely colored in with bright marker colors.
The music itself is best described as "new age," but I must stress that this is hardly a stereotypical late 80s new age album. The common tropes of the era - pan flutes, ethnic percussion, crisp digital quality synth pads - are, if present, buried deep in the mix: the overall tone Nextworld is a lot closer to 70s and 80s era ambient and kosmische. It wouldn't sound remotely out of place next to any recent lo-fi synth project either, something like 1991 for instance.
Jaxon Crow in undated photo. (courtesy of JD Emmanuel)
I had to dig quite a bit to find what little about Jaxon Crow was available online. Luckily I was able to find a link to renowned Texan electronic musician James Daniel Emmanuel, better known as JD Emmanuel. Through correspondence with him I found out a bit more about Jaxon, who sadly passed away in 2005. I will continue with more details about Jaxon Crow and the musical content of Nextworld in a later post, but in the meantime, give it a listen below. If it weren't for seemingly cosmic fate this lovely music could of easily been lost, so I look forward to others enjoying his music.
Update: Biography and updated discography @ Ultravillage - big thanks to Mark Griffey for his extensive research.
Technical info
Country: U.S.
Label: Neon-Tetra (self-release imprint of Jaxon Crow), tape #1037
Case: Norelco
J-card: cardstock, single fold
C-45 Type I; unknown manufacturer
Actual run-time: approx. 22:40 per side
Editing notes: clicks at beginning and ending trimmed off, normalized from original levels of -20 to -30 db, no noise removal used.
Welcome to Tape Escape! This blog will document my efforts to archive the many unique cassette tapes I have in my collection. After figuring out a digitizing and scanning workflow over the past few weeks, things are finally up and running, starting with a scan and upload of Jaxon Crow's Nextworld cassette release. More tapes to come in the days, weeks, and months ahead as I digitize and share my collection.
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