Cassette Revival, Great Memories But Please No
by John Diliberto 8/12/2024
Cassettes. I never loved them. I’m talking commercial cassette releases of albums. Sound wasn’t as good. Going to specific tracks was a pain. The art work always suffered, even more than on CDs. So it surprised me when cassettes started having a revival. I mean, what’s next, 78s?
But in the 1980s and 90s, cassettes were the way a lot of musicians released their work. It was much cheaper in every way than printing up a vinyl record and later, a CD. So cassettes did come my way over the years. Artists like Chuck Jonkey, Peter Davison, Iasos and Emmanuel would send me their albums on cassette. My first copy of Steve Roach’s Structures from Silence was a cassette. New Age and Electronic music pretty much began as a cassette endeavor. Most of them eventually turned into CDs and I got rid of the cassette, but some didn’t or I just never got them. Some cheaper record labels would send me promotional copies on cassette, which is why I have a bunch of Midnight Oil albums.
Recently, I unboxed by cassette collection, which is nowhere near as impressive as my vinyl and CD libraries and as a collection, it’s mostly somewhere between unremarkable and unimportant, but there were some great gems in there and lots of memories. I have live recordings done for WXPN and releases from the great 1980s Philly Electronic Music scene. There are cassettes from English electronic artist Mark Shreeve who we lost in 2022. Those were good enough to get me to England to interview him for the Totally Wired series in 1982. Funny enough, in the late 2010s he asked me if I had this early work like Embryo and Phantom because he no longer had them and wanted to release them on CD.
A lot of these artists are from Philadelphia. I have live performance recordings of Ghostwriters, a legendary electronic band of Charles Cohen and Jeff Cain. Cohen was garnering new attention late in his career when tragedy, then death struck him down in 2017. Jeff Cain is still working in electronic music. There’s Tangent, the electronic duo of Jeff Coulter and Chris Schwartz. As far as I know, their recordings never even made it to indie cassettes. I have handwritten cassettes from them, called Tangent 1, 2, 4 and 5. I don’t know what happened to Tangent 3. Schwartz went on to co-found Ruffhouse records, going from space music to hip-hop, producing artist like The Fugees, Cypress Hill, Kriss Kross and other hit makers. Coulter was involved with it for a while as well but eventually departed and has performed with another musician as the Tangent Project. You’ll also find releases from WOZ, Paul Woznicki from Delaware who started out with phase shifted electric piano before adding synths and creating a sound somewhere between Weather Report and Klaus Schulze. Woz is still creating.
One of the greatest artistic losses in my cassette collection is Darren Kearns. He was a killer guitarist creating beautiful spacescapes. He put out one commercial album, Optimal Being. It’s now out of print but check it out on YouTube. I have a live set from Kearns recorded in 1984 at the Painted Bride in Philadelphia at the last Oscillation Zone concert. Darren has been MIA and off the grid since there was a grid.
There are also rarities from better known artists. I have the Philip Glass Ensemble recorded live at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1980 performing “Dance” and guitarist Fred Frith is there, recorded at United Calvary Methodist Church in Philadelphia in 1979. My cassette of National Health’s live performance at the Main Point in 1979 formed part of the album, Playtime, released by Cunieform. These were all officially recorded performances and sound great.
Those cassettes are a nice trip down memory lane. If I had the time, I’d digitize them, then dump ’em, but for now, they are here, totally playable. I’ve surprisingly received a few cassettes from artists including, Steve Roach and his album, Nostalgia for the Future released in 2017. But if you really want to get played on Echoes, you will not send a cassette. Like vinyl, they’re great for memories, but were mainly a transitional technology. And 78’s? I have some of them too and a Victrola to play them on, but I don’t go there much.
Hey, I like Midnight Oil.
Oh, So do I. I just wouldn’t have them on cassette.
Label prerecorded cassettes were poor quality, of the tape, the shell, and those self rotting foam pressure pads instead of the metal springy felt pad. Then the recording was a transfer print-off not a linear recording. I always bought LP’s and recorded them to play in the car etc. 2 albums on one tape no loss of quality.
The only cassettes I still have are my mixtapes…a lot of thought went into those!