Wednesday, September 14, 2022

End Of Side One--Please Turn Tape Over

     I recently got a split tape from the Bad At Raving Foundation via the Hair On My Food Tapes distro- Local Duo and NJ9842, and so far I've only actually listened to the first side because I'm terrible at finding the time to actually listen to things, but Local Duo (which is one of the projects of Carl Kruger, at least according to Discogs) was good enough that I checked out the label and ordered the two releases they had physicals of (on CDR--yecch! but sometimes you gotta I guess). Part of what appealed to me about it was that it seemed to be recorded onto cassette, and not in a four track kind of way, but like direct line onto a cassette recorder--it actually reminded me of Dogproofraccoonbubble in a lot of ways, which coming from me is a compliment of the highest order! The first side of the tape ended in layers and layers of cassette hiss, like a rhythmic wash from one of the cheapie white-noise machines in the early 2000s, and when that click-popped to a stop it was followed soon after by a sample from a fire-and-brimstone sounding Southern preacher, who was shortly cutoff--midsentence no less!--by the very same preacher compelling you to turn the tape over to continue the program that would surely lead you to salvation. Obviously I was unmoved--I still haven't actually played side two, and I'm actually sitting in relative silence, listening only to the ticking of a pocketwatch and the spinning of an electric fan. Actually if I was to turn and look over my shoulder I would see the setup that I should be recording, rather than writing this nonsense.

    Anyway, this led me to the real point of this rant--I started looking for those messages you would find occasionally find on cassettes, imploring you to continue on to side two of the program. Honestly, I thought they would be all over the place, on Youtube playlists and Archive.org, but there isn't anything! Or rather, it's hard to find anything--there's probably someone out there who has compiled a bunch of recordings like this somewhere, but it's hard to find because search results prioritize things that can be monetized. The results I do get are only tangentially related to what I'm looking for, and all the search engines seem to be based on the same architecture and give you the same bullshit, at least the ones I'm using. I found the whole thing depressing, but it has motivated me to try to compile what recordings of this nature I have. I guess I could release it as a mixtape, like the Something Weird Intermission Mixtape. We'll see if anything actually comes of it, not that anyone could find it or would even bother to look if they could.

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