Tapes From The Tape

Some on the shells I painted recently

    

    A little over a year ago, while in the midst of watching videos about circuit bending, I remember seeing the famous Amulets video about making tape loops and my focus started to shift. My thrift store runs and garage sale weekends were starting to including me looking for tape players. I started looking for bulk tape buys on eBay and one day came across a box of about 50 cassettes that came in 2 packs for $20. From there I started messing around with loops a little bit, but was never fully happy with my results for the amount of time and effort put in so the loop making started to fade out.

Some tapes from my original eBay purchase

    Flash forward to today and something has fully reignited my interest in cassette tapes and loops. I’ve had some recording ideas but I've also had allot of ideas on recycling old cassettes into brand new works, more than loops. Not as in using old recorded tape, but unused tape from blanks and the outer shells from unwanted tapes (Just paint the shells and they are ready to use).

A successful day of garage saleing

    This last week I got lucky at some garage sales and goodwill and found lots of old blank tapes (some recorded on already some sealed) and lots of old cassettes with screws in the shells that I can break down for later. I even found a second micro-cassette recorder and an old cassette answering machine to use as a cassette eraser for blanks that are recorded on (planning to make a video about how I'm using it).

Cassette tape answering machine for quickly erasing already recorded
blanks I find

    On top of that I also purchased a few Type IV Metal Cassettes  on ebay and a 1/8" splicing kit from Splicit that I'm excited to get and try out.

    I look forward to all the things I now have planned involving music and tapes and hope to share more as I go!