11 2005 |
A lot of the tapes are just music -- everyone used to tape off the radio, right? Go back to reel-to-reels, I've got stacks of pure music.
A little science for you: When you record tape, the record heads are making two little lines on the tape itself, right behind what's called an 'erase head.' The erase head is what makes sure nothing is on the tape already, otherwise they'd just mix and overlap...with interesting results if the audio was recorded on the other side (the tape would be moving backwards, essentially). Some recorders are designed to record only one direction, and mono ones put their audio tracks in different places from stereo tracks.
Why do I bring this up? In the olden days, there were mono recorders, and stereo recorders, and some tape was good quality, others sucked, and the same went for recorders as well. This particular tape I'm listening to seems to have been passed around between recorders, and bad ones at that -- things didn't get erased, tape direction is all wonky, and some guy recorded over a tape of him trying to train his bird to talk with sounds of him trying to get his dog to 'sing'. Combined with the 1968 Top 40 overlapped on Side B, this tape has a new musical form all it's own. I call this tune: Cacophony Mix.
Thank you for this aural pleasure.
--JD Strander , 1/11/2005 18:15:56
Glad you enjoyed it! Wait -- did you actually say "pleasure"? Hmmmm....maybe you didn't listen to the right MP3 ;)
--Derek , 1/11/2005 19:58:40