SK-1012 - Traditional Chinese Lounge Music

Unknown Chinese Tape #1 - (Catalog # SK-1012) (1979)

Hi-Resolution Gallery

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.

Side A

Side B

Technical info

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.

Tropical Rain Forest

Nature's Music - Tropical Rain Forest (1988)

Hi-Resolution Gallery

"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. 

Side A

Side B

Technical info

Country: U.S.A. (Nashville, TN 37203)
Label: Silver Bells Music
Case: Norelco
J-card: Basic cardstock
C-62