Home Tapers

Home Tapers

I started making home tape recordings on a Grundig portable reel-to-reel that took 3 inch reels sometime approximately between 1967 & 1969 when I was aged 13 to 16. I'd play the piano (&, perhaps, harmonica) & record it & then listen to it back. I acidentally threaded the tape wrong & 'discovered' backwards playback. That was an important moment for me. Here's the info about a movie I made 'reenacting' that time:

674. "Reenactment"

- 1080p HD 29.97p, Stereo

- 18:54

- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/jjm80p5d6cY

- on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/reenactment

I didn't get a mono cassette recorder until around 1973. My family didn't have much money so such things were luxuries even tho I think the very-bottom-of-the-line K7 recorder I got at the time cost somewhere between $20 & $40.

My friend Chris Mason started an audio tape publishing label in later 1978 or early 1979 called Widemouth ( WdmUindex.html ). The 1st tape he published was called "duo O accident" & was by his collaborators Kirby Malone & Marshall Reese. It was probably released in January of 1979. I wrote a review of it that was published in the periodical of the Maryland Writers Council, Hard Crabs, in February, 1979.

Chris published the 1st 8 tapes & then encouraged me to publish what turned out to be the next 4: "Testes-3 Broadcast Tapes", documentation of an underground telephone network that I had cofounded. Around the same time, in 1980, I self-published my 1st sampler tape of my own work called "Usic - 1". Chris had committed himself to publishing 6 specific other tapes but had never done so. In 1981, he moved from BalTimOre to Amsterdam & handed over the tape label to myself & Patty Karl.

Patty & I published the 6 that Chris had planned & another 8 of our choosing. That made a total of 26 tapes in the 1st series. Patty left & I continued the label under the new series name of demo tapes. There were 28 releases in that series.

I moved on to a new series that I call WIdemoUth tapes. There've been 29 releases under that name so far. In the meantime, I've also published records, CD-Rs, VHS tapes, DVD-Rs, CDs, & 16mm films, etc. These days, I tend to think of all of my publications as being under the umbrella of Wide. Whether I ever get around to organizing their public presence under that name is a different story.

I've produced such a plethora that even trying to keep track of it all is highly time-consuming. My "Audiography" is here: Audiography.html , my "Bibliography" is here: Bibliography.html .

Since 1980, I've corresponded with many other people who make home recordings & put some effort into trying to find the folks whose work has interested me the most & to trade recordings with them. I still find cassettes to be an excellent medium.

The heyday of tape trading was the 1980s, before the internet & higher postal rates shifted what was convenient & affordable for people. During that decade I corresponded with as many as 1,400 people, almost all of whom I'm currently out-of-touch with.

The purpose of this website is to provide at least a minimal historic record of this lively community. The ethos of trading recordings & other home-made product has largely disappeared from my dealings w/ other people. While I have hundreds of publications, most people I know have few or none. As such, trading isn't usually much of a possibility anymore.

Given that I'm an extremely busy person in many disciplines & that I have to work for a living & that I live slightly above & sometimes dramatically below the 'poverty line' how much time I'll devote to this project is questionable. After all, I might drop dead any time now. In the meantime, below's a list of the tapes that I've gotten in trade, organized in the order that I have them filed under in the cardboard boxes I keep them in. If & when there's a link, clicking on the name may take you to a webpage with an image of the K7 packaging or other relevant info.

In some rare cases the tapes are just mix tapes, the lowest common denominator of some tape trading & the ones of the least interest to me. I may choose to eventually highlight the work of the people that I find most exceptional. A large part of what I got (& still get) out of trading is the personal contact. I much prefer that to simply being a consumer of products of people that I have no connection with. Then again, I also want to love the music so I access recordings based ultimately on the criteria of my enthusiasm for them.

I don't endorse the standarization of much home taping, especially as practiced today. I don't think that basic J-card designs are interesting, I don't think that nth generation Industrial Music is very interesting, etc. The people that I'm the most impressed by think outside the cassette case both in packaging & in the audio product.