At the Chimes
I fondly recall a childhood me, bright-tailed and bushy-eyed, slowly nodding off to what seemed an endless supply of read-along adventure cassette tapes. All naturally featured a guest appearance by my mother, who would turn the tapes after they had squealed themselves to a terrifying final click. I feel genuine sorrow for the latchkey kids whose folks could afford tape decks with auto-reverse.
Later in life, I purchased my first beloved albums on cassette. I wore blank the magnetic encoding of all of my favorite tunes. My ability to accurately fast-forward to any given location of a tape became uncanny. I doubt that the forthcoming CD/DVD generation will ever know the simple joys and sorrows of extended rewind–anticipation being too often the better half any worthwhile endeavor.
I was known not only to re-embowel many a suicidal cassette with the aid of an ever present number-two pencil, as many of my generational cohorts were also apt to do, but also to splice the tape if ever it became necessary. I once successfully performed the first open-cassette spool transplant of Sebadoh’s Bakesale into a donor cassette. Bakesale pulled through.
Still later, I found myself endeavoring in such worthwhile pursuits as learning how to read a VU meter. The concept of capturing audio was life altering for me. A chest of fatally overdubbed “demos” still haunts a dusty basement footlocker, pining for me to someday set them free.
And so forgive me if the hollow, haunting gaze of an outdated audio medium too often fills me with undue nostalgia, at least we’re not talking 8-tracks here.
-mixtape
Tags: Recording, Cassete, Tape, Music, Audio
RSS
Leave a Reply