Visto desde varias perspectivas, que van desde el atuendo de Alison Goldfrapp en sus conciertos - muy parecido a cientos de cintas desenredadas -, el libro Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture de Thurston Moore analizando el arte de todos los materiales que recibió mientras estaba de gira en los 80 y los artistas visuales Jammes Benoit y Erica Iris Simmons creando obras con base en la carcasa y las cintas, era de esperarse que el formato prevalecería sobre el olvido y sería retomado por diferentes géneros.
La realidad es que dentro de la electrónica, el punk, el metal y el indie, el cassette no ha desaparecido, incluso es toda una vertiente que responde a factores económicos, creativos y artísticos o simplemente una cuestión de fidelidad a algo con lo que se creció en la década de los 80, como pueden leer en el siguiente fragmento del libro Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past de Simon Reynolds.
"Tape, with its lo-fidelity warmth and hiss and its frailty in the face of time, is integral to Ariel Pink's musical means of production. All of his early, most influential releases were recorded at home on an eight-track tape-mixer, with Pink playing all the instrumental parts and crudely overdubbing them, and simulating the 0 en Cil drums with his mouth, human beat-box style. James Ferraro goes one step further into analogue lo-fi he makes his music cassette boom-boxes, an ultra-primitive substitute for the multitrack home studio.
These associations have been picked up on by the musicians who followed in the wake of The Skaters and Ariel Pink - groups with names like Tape Deck Mountain, Memory Tapes, Memory Cassette - and turned into cliche. Most of the people in the post-Skaters/Pink scene actually put out the bulk of their music as cassettes. This resurgence of the cassette format in underground music scenes in recent years (at the start of the 2ooos the music would have been more likely to circulate as CD-Rs or, for the real aesthetes, vinyl) stems from an odd mix of aesthetics, ideology and pragmatism.
Part of it relates to the double association cassettes have with the eighties. On the mass level, the pre-recorded cassette was that decade's quintessential format, how most kids would have listened to music (either on boom-boxes in their bedrooms or using Walkman-style portable players).
But cassettes were also the preferred means of dissemination for ultra-underground eighties scenes like industrial and noise, the ancestors of today's hypnagogic and drone. Tape was the ultimate in do-it-yourself, because it could be dubbedon-demand at home, whereas vinyl required a heavier financial outlay and a contractual arrangement with a manufacturer.
Today's post-noise micro-scenes maintain the tape-trade tradition both for the sense of countercultural continuity and for economic reasons. According to Britt Brown, who eo-manages the Los Angeles-based label Not Not Fun, 'The bulk of CD manufacturers require the customer to order a minimum of soo units just to run a job. But tapes can be purchased in boxes of as few as fifty copies. They can be dubbed at home, or professionally dubbed, for an extremely reasonable cost.'
He says that contrary to rumours 349 that blank cassettes are no longer being manufactured, they are still very easy to come by because they remain a staple format in the developing world and are still popular among certain communities in America: (like fundamentalist Christians, who use them to record and distribute sermons). Another advantage to using cassettes is that the low cost and fast turnaround means that the artists can record frequently and release quickly, which helps explain why artists like Ferraro and Clark have immense, endlessly accruing discographies that seep out into the world like a continuous spoor of semi-conscious creativity. Cassette-mania also has an aesthetic dimension: tape fans enthuse about the 'warmth' of the sound, a lot like vinyl but much cheaper to achieve.
'Foggier, texture-based music' suits tape, says Brown, whereas 'sparkling Technicolor pop' made in a proper recording studio would obviously come aqoss to its fullest on CD. 'The trancier, drugged, hazy-style psych/drone styles we focus on sound fantastic on cassette.' Cassettes also offer more opportunities for artwork than CD-Rs (elaborate fold-out inlays, boxes, and so forth).
Hypnagogic pop has created its own highly defined cassette-cover art style: washed-out, 'photocopy-of-a photocopy' images that are like fading after-images of a dream that you're struggling to cling onto after waking; and photo collages that montage images cut out of magazines (lots of eyes and mouths) and have an effect that is gauchely grotesque yet oddly powerful, and that above all suits the music.
Cassettes could be considered a hauntological format because, like the scratches and surface noise on vinyl, the hiss of tape noise reminds you constantly that this is a recording. But cassettes are also a ghost medium in the sense that as far as mainstream culture is concerned, they are dead, an embarrassing relic. The cult of the cassette has spread beyond the no-fi underground to become a retro fad, with young hipsters wearing T-shirts adorned with cassettes or belt buckles actually made out of old cassette shells."
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario