Tape Hunting

Tape Hunting I really love audio cassettes. They make for a fun semi-ephemeral medium for music, and I love the limitations and concessions made to make music (particularly experimental and electronic music) sound good on them. However for most small batch releases or little experiments, I don’t want to have to order a bunch of pre-cut blank tapes and contribute to the creation of more plastic. There’s still a few secondhand stores that sell tapes (savers and half price books both still do at time of writing), and if you have the ability to dub tapes it can be ridiculously simple to make 10 or so in an evening. In order to make it easier to sort through the mountains of tapes I have a series of little heuristics I have to quality check by eye that hasn’t failed me yet. here are my tips from order of exterior to interior The first thing I like to do is make a pass through and separate out tapes I expect weren’t listened to much if ever. tapes still in the plastic, random unpopular doo…