Originally released in 2005. Here is a slightly altered description of this release from the original Earjerk catalog...
The story behind this tape begins with a huge festering box of 90-minute cassette tapes I had amassed. These tapes were full of old and new recordings, most of which I had made myself. Recordings of jams, live shows, experiments, but also of general found sound. Tapes I had found at thrift stores or at rummage sales with recordings already on them, recorded and abandoned by someone unknown.
Being an obsessive recorder and packrat but never a practicing documentarian (I’ve been called a poor archivist) many of these cassettes were left unmarked, or if marked, then only with some indecipherable scribble unreadable even to myself. “I had this bad habit of doing that,” I was quoted as saying, “I guess I wanted to make it more mysterious for myself.” I had already listened through the tapes once and deemed almost 90% of the content unusable for any particular project I had running. Some pieces were too short, too boring, or too long. Too distorted, too quiet, or too much. Whatever it may be, these tapes were going nowhere.
I decided to go through each one of these 90-minute tapes, take all of the worthy material, boil it down, and pack it onto one, bulging, festering 90-minute tape and then recycle the whole lot by dubbing over the source materials.
All of the original versions of this release retained just a minute or two of audio from the source cassette it was recorded onto, preserving a small snippet of audio from that particular source cassette. Usually this was at the end or the beginning of the tape, but not as a rule.
Found sound, recording mistakes, tape-collage mash-up recordings of unknown bands captured live, this thing has tracks from everywhere and everyone. Tracks from the Davenport Family, Right Arm Severed, Kino Rattlers, Craig Microcassette System - but good luck identifying any of them- I can't! Also contains really, really, super duper rare jams from we-cant-say-who.
Each of these self-contained pieces represents a salvaged chunk of audio revealed to me from the murk of an almost completely abandoned source tape. Some of the track dividers are quite arbitrary, but many are not. When making the digital copy of this from the final master tape I could have easily divided it into either more or fewer tracks.
I considered trying to identify some of these tracks by adding some notes for each of them here, but decided against it. I did include notes with some of the original cassettes that I had sent out to folks. Sometimes these were photocopied notes, sometimes hand-written track notes with artists names for the individual tracks, so ther are actually several variations of these liner notes floating around out there, possibly with mistakes and/or conflicting information. I believe I had accidentally sent out the original hard copy of the liner notes to someone who had ordered the tape and was forced to try and decipher again, from scratch, who and what and where some of these tracks had originated! Although I recorded many of them, I just can’t always recall. But pick my brain, if you must...
Fun fact: Eventually I re-released this in a very limited fashion on two separate 45-minute CDRs with instructions to play them on random shuffle. I’ve presented the tracks here as they appeared on the original cassette and double CDR versions. I had worked for some time on sequencing the tracks for the sides of the cassette to be sure that each had a good flow, but I have to say, I am very pleased with how well these tracks play together in whatever damn order they appear!
Please contact me if you have any concerns, questions, or corrections pertaining to anything posted here. The lack of credits on many tracks is due mostly to my haphazard documentation. If you wish to be implicated, please come forward!
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