Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Len Eats Tapes
A fabulous comment from erstwhile Submit Responser Len, in a MetaFilter thread about beautiful old cassettes, in response to the question ‘What is this about?’:
It’s about your life. Well, it’s about mine, anyway. Everything I ever taped off the radio. Every album I transferred from vinyl to tape so that I could listen to it while walking to school. Every compilation tape I made, for me or anyone else dumb and/or determined enough to listen to them. Every hour spent hunched up, surrounded by piles of records, finding something just the right length to fit at the end of the tape. Every car journey with my parents, frantically fighting for this or that tape to be played. Every album that I loved intensely for three weeks fifteen years ago, but haven’t thought about in years.
It’s about the fact that I remember Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade being recorded on a Sony UX Turbo 100 [“Ideal for Car Stereos”], with some Replacements on the end to fill the remaining 25 minutes. The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Psychocandy? A That’s MG-X 60, opened up and cut to exactly the right length for the album, because I was too lazy/impatient to piss about with fast forwarding to the end of the side. A taped-from-the-radio bootleg of Sonic Youth at Reading Festival, 1992, on a TDK SA-90, recorded on a September evening when I should have been studying for a French exam, and not listening to the radio and smoking fags out my bedroom window in a clumsy attempt to disguise it from my parents. This is all stuff that I have forgotten, years and years ago, and until I saw that page, I couldn’t have remembered even if my life depended on it.
That’s what it’s about.
That’s the comment equivalent of a non-stop cabaret of champagne and limousines, that is! (The preceding link will expire soon, sadly - please refer to Pseud’s Corner, Private Eye no. 1144.)
Comments
Jump to comment form