DO NOT UPLOAD MY CREATIONS ANYWHERE, EVER, IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM WHATSOEVER. DO NOT MAKE COPIES OF MY CREATIONS ANYWHERE, EVER, IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM WHATSOEVER. THIS INCLUDES ANYTHING I EVER CREATED, SUCH AS MY TAPES, TAPE COVERS, PHOTOGRAPHS, CDR COVERS, 7" VINYL SLEEVES, DRAWINGS, PAINTINGS, ZINES, ETC...
So this is where the glorious "cassette culture" ends... on Discogs? This is not a joke. I did not create this post for laughs. If you find it funny, then you are a douchebag.
Discogs is a multi-million dollar corporate AMERICAN website run by millionaire jesuit parasites.
When a person (I use the term loosely) uploads images and information there, it is locked-in. Discogs REFUSES to remove it. Then they slap ads on it.
Thanks to people like Karsten Rodemann, aka Graf Haufen, Discogs username "Mr. Slut", the cassette scene and its artifacts are being locked into Discogs corporate database.
Forever.
See for yourself in these screenshots:
DISCLAIMER: This is a memoire of MY time trading cassettes through the post in the 1990s. It is not some comprehensive overview of the "cassette culture" era.
As I write this, in the Australian winter of 2022, I am 33 years on from the humid North Jersey summer of 1989, when I created my first proper tape album, and stepped into what some now call "cassette culture".
IMHO, Cassette Culture refers to anything anybody ever did with an audio cassette tape during the cassette era. According to Wikipedia, the audio cassette was invented in 1963 and quickly became the predominant medium for personal audio exchange. Depending on what part of the world you lived, cassettes were still going strong into the 2000’s. The cassette era encompassed everything from office dictation, to audio letters between relatives, music mixtapes and walkmans, to phone answering machines. At its peak, news, sports and music programs were syndicated internationally on cassette tape.
From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, in the US anyway, the cassette was king, for EVERYBODY. Blank tapes were sold in the supermarket alongside the milk and toilet paper. Everybody had a pile of them littering the floor of their car. Everybody had a walkman. Cassettes were an everyday thing. They were to audio what cameras and film were to images. Everybody had them, and everybody used them, every day.
I have a recollection from the late '80s of heading downstairs at the original Knitting Factory by the Puck Building, and the entire wall of the staircase was bricked up with cassettes. Apparently demo tapes that bands had dropped off or sent to the club in hopes of getting a gig there. A wall of cassettes that would put Zan Hoffman's collection to shame. My point is, EVERYBODY put their music on cassettes back then.
In 1988, when I decided to devote myself to making my own music, and distribute it on homemade cassettes, I was entering an alternative musical universe to the one I'd been participating in for the decade prior.
From 1979 to 1987, I'd been playing in bands as a drummer-for-hire. These were bands without any musical wit, charm, or personality. The music we played was a lame imitation of what you'd hear on the radio or buy in the record shops.
It's funny, because before, when I didn't know that this "cassette underground" existed, I was making my own music at home and sharing it on cassettes to my friends, bandmates and co-workers. Even as a child, in the late '60s early '70s, I’d mess around with my Dad's shoebox cassette machine, making weird sounds on tape when the batteries wore down. Later I would experiment with handheld recording devices, crude tape recorders such as dictaphones, boomboxes, and cheap consumer cassette 4-track machines. Much of the commercial music I owned was on cassette as well as vinyl. In the mid-1970s I joined the Columbia cassette club, where they sold off all the unpopular cassettes in their catalog for pennies. In 1975 I was 13 years old and I had “Olias of Sunhillow” on cassette. And starting in the late 1970s, I started experimenting with crude tape-to-tape multi-track recording. Just because these tapes are in the rock vein, and just because I never sent one of these tapes through the post to some German noise zine until 1989, does not mean they are not part of "cassette culture". So GFY, noise tape snobs. Cassette culture belongs to everybody who lived in the cassette era, no matter what they did with the cassettes.
When I was young (I was 20 in 1982), I wanted to be in a successful avant-garde rock band the way most people want a career, a mortgage, a spouse and two kids. So I would make these recordings, and compile them into mixtape cassettes, for which I would create unique j-cards, and then share them with people I knew. Each tape was a one-off, these were not "tape albums". Often I would compile mixtapes and sneak one of my original tape creations into the mix with the classic prog rock.
It was obvious to me that anyone who I gave one of these tapes to either didn't listen to it, or listened to it and hated my stuff. When you are trying to “multi-track” using two boomboxes, it sounds like shit. These were regular mainstream people who had never heard The Residents or Chrome. These were people who had cassettes and cassette players at home, and to them the idea of recording yourself trying to make music was strictly amateur hour. They were reluctant to say so to my face, but you can tell. When people like something you make or do, they ask for more. Or when they tell their friends about it, they recommend it, they don't use it as a source of comedy at your expense behind your back. Or when one of them becomes a successful band manager, they get you a $300,000 advance like they did for the band you turned them onto, instead of treating your tapes like chopped liver, which they did.
So, in the Summer of 1989, after quitting the rock drummer slave routine, after I realized you could actually get somebody at a thing called a “zine” to take your cassette tape seriously, I decided to make a proper cassette album, and call it "Charm". I created a pseudonym "MJB-89" (based on how I signed my paintings and drawings). I created a fancy color j-card for the whole thing, which I intended to distribute beyond family, friends and co-workers. It was a collection of recordings I'd been working on for a year, in an elaborate 4-track basement studio that my friend Paul Rose had constructed (and was gracious enough to let me use).
What I didn't realize when I did all this, was that I was about to enter an alternate musical universe. A universe of serious cassette geekery.
This parallel reality is what people now refer to as the "cassette underground", or the "home taper network", or "cassette culture". It helps to remember that, prior to the Internet, the only way for people who weren't in proper bands to get their music around, was through this network of zines, college radio DJs, and micro cassette labels. The network operated via the postal system. It was international, but unfortunately dominated, like everything else in this world, by egomaniacal white dudes in their thirties. That said, there were nodes in every part of the world, from every type of individual. This network blended in with a pre-existing network of anarchist zines and alt lifestyle zines, alt music zines, and mail art practitioners.
The alt music zines had come about earlier in the 80s, and were a reaction to corporate mega rock music journalism. In the back of these magazines were cassette reviews, which then spawned both the home taper phenomenon itself, and the zines with bulging cassette review sections.
The majority of what went on in the cassette underground was what became known as "noise". These were tapes of music that was not song based, it was electronic, abstract sound, often harsh electronic noises, or found sound collages, and the tapes were designed to have a certain brutal xerox aesthetic with disturbing band names and titles to go with. This is the portion of the 1980s and 1990s cassette underground that is still celebrated today amongst collectors and old dudes on Facebook trying to sell their hometaper history books.
So there I was in late 1989, with my homemade cassette tape album of what NYC music critic Jim Santo later described as "Jonathan Richman meets Neil Young at They Might Be Giants' house to trade a copy of Syd Barrett's "Opel" for a box of Good N' Fruity". I'd been branded and sent off to the livestock pen before I'd even got started! The description is utterly inaccurate. The names he drops are professional, real musicians. The kind of people who get paid to create the garbage that litters the airwaves. I am not a musician. The sounds I create are not music, they are artwork.
In 1989 there was a shop on St. Mark's Place in NYC called "See Hear" that sold zines. In those zines I found the names and addresses of hundreds of people making mail art, zines and tapes, who were willing to trade with me for a copy of "Charm".
Bear in mind, that back in the day, if one's cassette "album" was a C90, that meant making one copy cost you 90 minutes of your life. And unless you were recycling old found cassettes, you were paying the pernicious "tape tax" that the recording industry had foisted upon the blank media industry when you purchased blank tapes. At one point I had 3 boom boxes and tape decks chained together to make simultaneous copies, but that was as good as it got. It is also worth remembering that cassette tapes were still common currency in 1985, regular people used them to make mixtapes all the time. In 1995 if you gave a regular person a cassette tape, they looked at you like you were driving a horse and buggy.
Imagine after the nonsense of hand dubbing tapes, the joy of burning an entire album to cdr in a few minutes. That's nothing compared to the joy of uploading an entire body of work to the Internet in a few minutes. Pretty soon I'll upload myself to the Internet and be done with it.
One of the first early trades was with Mike Jourgensen (Longmont Potion Castle, etc) who at that time had a zine called "Spinal Jaundice". Mike later went on to do a great many things, including telling me off for selling his zines, tapes and CDs in 2014 when I was in a health/financial crisis and facing homelessness. You could make a joke about a homeless hometaper here, but it wouldn't be funny.
Other early trades I did were with folks like Don Campau, Lord Litter and Little Fyodor. We traded tapes. Only later did I find out that they were "underground DJs" as well, and that they'd played my tape on their radio shows. Some hometapers happened to be zinesters, fluxus mail artists and underground DJs, as well recording their own music at home.
When I sent Don Campau my tape in 1991, because I saw his write-up in Fact Sheet Five, he sent me "Short, Stupid and Broke" in trade. It wasn't until later, in 1992, that I received an aircheck tape of his KKUP radio show, on which he'd played my tape. I didn't even know he was a DJ. I wasn't seeking airplay. The point is, the hometaper network was about trading tapes, not about trying to get famous. That said, we all would have loved to quit our day jobs and buy a house, like anybody would. We knew that the audio art we were making was never going to have that value in the world, and the personal networking became a “secret society” that mainstream people were not invited to.
If the hometaper and zine scene were walled gardens, some were hostile tribes. I sent a tape to "Maximum Rock'n'Roll", a punk zine. I thought of myself as a person who had a few parts rock and punk, but when I got my copy of the zine, the review they gave my tape said "don't bother"- that's it, that's all it said, a two word put-down.
I sent the tape in order to trade for a copy of the zine. If they didn't like it, they could've excluded me altogether by tossing my tape in the trash, but they went out of their way to write it, and spent the money to send it to me via the post, so as to not only rub it in my face that I was NOT a member of the Maximum'Rock'n'Roll club, but to rub it in that they'd informed their readers, and the world, in no uncertain terms, that I was not a member. Maybe I should wear it as a badge of pride. But I don't, it just reminds me that people suck. Maximum dickheads.
The bottom line on airplay and reviews. Unless they enable direct person-to-person trading, they are useless and more often harmful. DJs crossfading and ruining your tracks, incorrectly entering your information on airplay logs, zinesters and self-annointed critics writing stuff about you and your music that is incorrect and misleading. Who needs it? Hometapers make tapes and trade them, since when did they all become phony wannabe radio stars and music critics? Since the Internet, that’s when.
When I traded my tapes for zines, and then those zines printed a listing for me and my tape (known as a review), there were no billionaire parasites involved. Mike Gunderloy of Factsheet Five was not taking a cut of the $5 that somebody sends me in the post for my tape. He's not sending my info to the IRS. The only ads in FF5 were for other zines, tapes and counter-culture activities that had nothing to do with money or the real world. Contrast this to today's Internet, where every interaction is public, every speck of it is monetized by people who have nothing to do with your art or music, and the whole thing is being recorded by the NSA/CIA/IRS. Underground? I don't think so. More like a panopticon gulag. The Internet, especially Discogs, IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THE '90s CASSETTE CULTURE SCENE.
The 1990s cassette scene, as I experienced it, existed outside of the real music industry. Some of the more enthusiastic cheerleaders within the hometaper network liked to emphasize the differences between the network and the real music industry. Whilst there was a basic difference, that of "the haves and the have nots", unfortunately a lot of what went on seemed like either a micro imitation of the music industry paradigm, or a parody of it. There was no competition or labelling or exclusion, until the underground DJ chose which tapers got played, which tracks got played, and then your recording was pigeonholed by the guy's opinionated commentary on what HE thinks your music sounds like. If you are going to emulate the mainstream music industry, you should emulate the money as well.
In the hometaper underground I met a lot of people, traded a ton of tapes, and was inspired by the network to keep creating. During the heyday, I created over 10 hours of original, experimental indie-rock music. In the early 2000s, when the Internet was taking over the world, the scene died. As the hometapers slowly jumped onboard the web, the scene resurrected itself as some ungodly McFrankenstein creature that I could never really get down with, and it broke my heart.
A guy I used to trade tapes with, Dino DiMuro, one of the cassette culture originals, has recently written an article about cassette culture that is worth a read. In the original scene, most people created their zine, or cassette albums, at home by themselves. The bigger zines were done by a team of collaborators, and the bigger tape labels were actually a collective of sorts, with a revolving cast of characters. This was not proper bands or record labels. I'm thinking of people like Hal McGee and his zines and tapes.
Whilst Hal and I had totally different musical sensibilities, we both desired a network that was open, free of commerce, free of hierarchical categorizations, and uniquely personal and handmade. That was where we connected. But Hal was onto something I'd yet to dip into. Creative, collaborative networking.
Not just trading things and letters through the post. Creating stuff through the post. This type of networking isn't like being in some lame covers band, or some wannabe pop band, this was participating in an art activity with others via the mail. People creating noise tapes, art collages, free form zines, together, via the postal system.
Of the hometapers I ended up collaborating with, most were in my musical neck of the woods, which was unfortunately referred to as "pop music" by the noise gang. It bugs me that the hometapers and zinesters sought to pigeonhole my music in such a way (they do it on purpose. They like bugging people who can carry a tune and play the drums properly). The music I made, I thought of it as a more creative form of rock, a sort of "white album" aesthetic. I've always listened to experimental noise on LP going back to when I was a kid in the late '60s, and I'd always made experimental noise tapes at home. Paul Rose and I made experimental noise for an artist's opening as far back as 1985. It just never occurred to me to distribute it on cassette tape, as I was unaware of the cassette underground in 1985. Although, a look back at my 1991 cassette catalogue shows a tape called "Please Filth" that was noise. 1991. First published noise tape, I'd made plenty of noise and recorded it before that. Anyways, what I and the other "pop" types made, would now probably be thought of as "outsider music", but nobody used that word then. It seemed like the noise gang had that end of the spectrum pretty well stocked, so I created rock songs instead.
The artist I ended up having the closest working relationship with was KD Schmitz. KD made his own zine and his own tapes, and curated his own collaborative tape albums where participants from across the US created together through the post, often on a theme. Karl and I happened to live near each other, and he was the only collaborator with whom I had a face-to-face collaboration. We created work in each other's homes, unlike the collaborations that went on via the post, and towards the end, via the email.
Other hometapers with whom I collaborated with were Ken B. Miller (who I also met and hung out with), Don Campau (who I met and hung out with... he broke my guitar string), Ray Carmen, Dan Susnara, Ken Clinger, Ian C. Stewart, C. Reider, Dave Stafford, Zan Hoffman, Bryan Baker (whom I met in SLC), Scott Carr, as well as others who were not strictly "hometapers", but were painters, poets and musicians working outside the network.
Collaborating is interesting, challenging, often frustrating, and ultimately disappointing. DIY is far easier and more comfortable, which is what I ended up doing. 99.9% of my recorded work is the Michael J. Bowman "one-man-band". I also think that the point of collaborating is the activity itself, not the end product, and it causes me great dysphoria to see collaborations I was involved with years ago being flaunted and flogged on horrible corporate music shops like Bandcamp.
The whole point of the hometaper network, or at least I thought it was, was that we were all finally listening to each other. Unlike the mindless robotic rock bands I'd been in. The unfortunate reality was, most hometapers were megalomaniacs, legends in their own minds. The "I was supposed to be famous" types. This personality type is what spawns such things as outsider music and cassette culture networks. It comes with the territory. If you spent as many years trading tapes as I did, you amassed a huge tape collection. These collections are now making the rounds of the Internet. A mountain of tapes that nobody has heard of and will never listen to. But they'll be photographed, admired, auctioned off, and displayed in museums. Parasitic anal-retentive collector scum on Discogs trying to sell the sacred relics of a tribe they didn't belong to.
I am trying to retrieve, restore and remaster my audio art. The major sources for this re-iteration of my catalog is a pile of cdr wave masters I sent to Don Campau in 2015, right when the rug was pulled out from under me, and the wheels came off my wagon. In retrospect it was one of the smarter things I ever did, as I ended up selling or ditching everything I ever owned, and then briefly became homeless, after which I migrated halfway round the world with nothing but a suitcase. Thank you Don for saving my masters all those years, and for uploading them back to me.
C. Reider not only kept a copy of a CDR I'd sent him in 2006, but in a heartbeat he had it digitized and online for me to recapture. Cassette culture to the rescue.
In 2004 I had uploaded 200 of my own recordings as mp3s to the semperlofi website, which were miraculously cached by the Wayback Machine, where in 2021 I was able to download them back into my possession. (Internet Archive to the rescue).
In 2015 we fled the US and migrated to Oz with nothing but our suitcases. The old tapes, usb sticks, cdrs, vhs tapes, hard drives and laptops containing decades of recordings are languishing in an American attic. Maybe one day I will get them back, and be able to upload the rest of my hometaping files.
Now that I am immersed in my back catalog, archiving new "mixtape" iterations, I am struck by the journey these tracks have taken. From dictaphones, open reel, and cassette tapes, to vhs masters, to wav and aiff, then to mp3 and back again, bouncing off satellites, burrowing through servers, flying across invisible frequencies from cell tower to cell tower, some on cdrs sent half way round the world, to be uploaded, downloaded, and once again manipulated for new iterations.
To the hometaper friends I haven't corresponded with for decades, if you're reading this, you need to know that I am struggling. My wife has a terminal brain illness called PCA, which causes progressive dementia, she can no longer dress herself, feed herself, read or write, use a phone, or toilet or bathe herself, I must do it all for her, I provide that care on a 24/7 basis. And I've been diagnosed with spinal stenosis, which explains the unrelenting sciatica pain I've been battling for the past 20 years, one of the reasons I gave up drums. We live in a welfare flat with no car, no laundry. There's no money for toys, trips or meals out. I am also taking care of our 17-year-old. I have to take pregabalin every day, otherwise I'm in constant pain. I haven't been able to make music for over fifteen years.
So if you are reading this, please do not share my music and artwork with anybody. If you are broke, yes, by all means try to sell it. Otherwise please throw it away. I don't want my work in the hands of people I never knew, who only want to monetize it or upload it to corporate tenant farms run by billionaire parasites.
August 2022 (updated March 2024) it is worth noting that a portion of this blog post was "declined" by the old men who run the Facebook group "1980s-1990s Cassette Culture" - Don Campau, Jerry Kranitz and Jeff Chenault.
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