I was never a lover of cassettes the first time around in the 70s and 80s. I stuck firmly to vinyl for pleasure, in fact I can’t ever remember buying a commercially recorded tape. Of course I made compilations for friends and car journeys, with handwritten track lists, and if I devised any music myself I used the medium. With two recorders (I had a cassette and a reel to reel), double tracking and shuttling sounds between them was the equivalent of a rudimentary bedroom studio.
Since the resurgence of cassettes I’ve taken to the little blighters with renewed appreciation. Now I regularly buy stuff from labels like Invisible City, Matching Head, Steep Gloss and Minimal Resource Manipulation. Certain music I’m convinced sounds better being reproduced via the physically rotating wheels and magnetic heads of these machines. We’re tactile beings and the prevalence of streaming has reduced everything to meaningless digitised information that can’t be touched. It has severely altered our relationship to music, but that’s a whole other subject.
These days I have a tape player integrated into a cobbled together hi-fi system that isn’t going anywhere, but recently I also somehow managed to resuscitate a portable Boots unit so that it actually works. It means I can take it in the car and enjoy taped audio in transit.
Browsing the charity shops in Whitby I noticed a shelf full of tapes which appeared from nowhere. Somebody had obviously had a clear out. These were spoken word and mostly double cassettes. Poetry read by Kenneth Branagh is a rather fruity acquired taste I imagine, but nestled amongst them was The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. The reader was Robert Powell and the cover showed a dark, hooded figure and a gaggle of little snaggle toothed demons in the corner. I bought it and took it home.
It’s a beautiful thing, everything I dreamed it would be for £1.99. Currently I’m about two thirds through with a side and a half to go, and it’s enthralling and thrilling in equal measure with that underlying sense of an old and malevolent darkness infusing the world. Even in kid’s stories, Garner is so good at opening portals into hidden realms.
At about the same time I noticed a Shropshire folklorist called Amy Boucher that I follow on Mastodon had written an audio drama called The Best of Men. I downloaded both dramatised episodes and listened at night when the house was quiet and everyone else had gone to bed. Definitely the best time to visit a dark hill in Shropshire where arcane and nefarious rituals are being indulged in.
I was hooked by the framing device of a fictional TV show called Paranormal Takedown with a headstrong sceptic as a presenter. Of course, he gets his comeuppance in no uncertain terms, but you’ll have to listen for yourself. It’s all very atmospheric, and I think the chance discovery of this gripping folk horror brought back memories of recording radio plays from BBC Radio 4 and the like.
I remember having a recording of We Outnumber You, Ed Hime’s highly original tale of animals in a zoo turning the tables on their human captors with the assistance of a couple of eco-terrorists. It aired originally in 2010 and is what can only be described as a found footage audio drama, constructed from amateur recordings found on hand held devices after the catastrophic events. Quite devastating.
I couldn’t find my recording of it on my hard drive, but searching online I came across it on a YouTube channel called Mysterious Magpie. This is a treasure trove of forgotten haunted audio that can simply be clicked on and listened to, no need for downloading or signing in and all that malarkey.
I strongly recommend all the above, because sound is such a catalystic medium for firing the imagination and creating worlds.
Everything discussed in this post is here:
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner: https://tinyurl.com/ykjp24py
The Best of Men by Amy Boucher:
Part 1 https://www.buzzsprout.com/411730/12499890
Part 2: https://www.buzzsprout.com/411730/12600423
We Outnumber You by Ed Himes: https://tinyurl.com/2rybdysj
Mysterious Magpie: https://www.youtube.com/@mysteriousmagpie/about
taphonomy 