The Joy Of ’Settes

[May 28th, 2008]

For music fans of a certain age, the first recording owned wasn’t a CD, or even that sacred entity in the tangible music pantheon, the vinyl LP. Trumpeter about town Victor Nash, for instance, fondly remembers receiving Run DMC’s Tougher Than Leather as a gift on cassette tape—and surely he’s not alone. These days, the cassette has been relegated to novelty status; besides riding around in your friend’s ’86 Volvo station wagon, when was the last time you saw someone pop a tape into the old cassette deck? Yet three members of lush-pop outfit Point Juncture, WA are looking to change the medium’s yard-sale perception and bring it back into our collective consciousness, one eponymous “weird tape” at a time.

The project began in earnest when PJWA singer-vibraphonist Amanda Spring noticed a collection of unlabeled tapes in bandmate Andy Combs’ car. Inquiring about the mixes, which ran the gamut from narrated epics made by long-lost friends to three punk-rock albums crammed onto one tape, Spring discovered Combs’ dream to run an all-cassette label. The Weird Tapes project was born, but with a catch: Instead of releasing normal full-length records on a dated medium, what if they used tapes as a creative jump-off for their friends’ home experiments—those that, otherwise, would never escape the bedroom?

“We know so many musicians who self-release albums,” Spring says, “but everyone has that song or sound concept they’ve always wanted to release [that] doesn’t fit in with their usual style—like a shoegazer’s secret rap, or a rapper’s metal ballad.”

Instead of dragging those experiments straight from garage band to the trash bin, Spring, Combs and Nash decided to take a funky idea and make it a reality. After purchasing hundreds of cheap, purple translucent tapes from tape.com, the trio emailed some of their closest musical friends—including Norfolk & Western/Loch Lomond bass player Dave Depper and sunshine lounge-popper Alan Singley—offering up the concept of split releases. To their surprise, almost everyone wanted in—especially after they learned that each 34-minute tape would be divided into one musician per side, with pairings selected in lottery fashion: using names drawn out of a hat. One party (and many drinks) later, a series of 20 tapes was set for midsummer release.

Since artists were matched up completely at random, spontaneity—and judging from some of the entries’ initial ideas, self-indulgence—is fueling the music created specifically for Weird Tapes. “I’m trying to decide between stringing together five or six unfinished instrumental doodads or recording a brand new 17-minute prog epic on my own,” Depper half-jokes about his contribution, which will feature musician-producer Tucker Martine (the Decemberists, the Builders and the Butchers) on its other side.

Indeed, the first series features some notable artists—Andy Ferguson from science-folk outfit Bark Hide and Horn, IOA (Spring’s solo ukulele project) and the old-timey instrumentation of Decemberist stringman Chris Funk, for example. But most intriguing are contributions from occasional musicians such as Artistery booker Aaron Shepherd (who sometimes records ambient music as Metal), and those who usually take a back seat to their bands’ main songwriters: drummers Dusty Dybvig of BH&H and ex-Thermal Lorin Coleman of Andy Combs & the Moth, for instance.

“Cassettes seem like the perfect platform for what we wanted to do—ask our musician friends to produce a piece of recorded music that is as diverse and uninhibited as they are,” says Spring. “No holds barred—the weirder, the better.” The project is also nostalgic for a time when making a mix tape meant more than dragging a few files into an iTunes folder, when knowing how to pick the perfect opening track for side A was an honest-to-god skill.

That said, Weird Tapes’ aims are more on a fun and arty trip than a totally serious one—a product of Portland’s already notoriously tight-knit and, some would say, incestuous music community. Runs of each series will be limited to just 20 copies, and artists will own and have the freedom to distribute their tapes however they see fit.

“It’s definitely more an art project than a record label,” Spring says. “Most of this music will never be performed live, and some of these artists have never played or recorded music before. It will be a success if sooner rather than later someone finds one at the bottom of a cardboard box, pops it in their Walkman and says, ‘That’s weird.’”