Cassette Gods
 Issue #5

Hopefully you aren't sick of Best of 2007 lists yet. Cuz that is mostly what you'll find in this issue. Cassette Gods has survived 2007 and slowly crawls towards our one year anniversary. Who the fuck cares. Really. All that matters is the content stay meaningful yet fun. So hopefully you've been having a good time reading the reviews blog and will be stoked to see there is a new update to the columns! 
In 2008 you can expect to see some new staff appearing. This means more reviews, and quicker updates to the columns, as it won't be as necessary for every writer to find a moment to say something deep and earth demagnetizing.
As for me, helping keep Cassette Gods going well past 2008 is completely exciting to me. That said, I thought it would be fun to start a new year with a completely negative take on cassettes. Enjoy the paranoia!

A few weeks ago I lost my faith in cassettes. Not for too long, but long enough for the fear and frustration to be significant. I sat down to listen to a bunch of new cassettes. After getting through a handful, I noticed that all of these different bands were using the same phase filter on their final mix. Wait a second! Something must be wrong with my cassette deck. The heads must be dirty or something. Cuz the sound just keeps warbling all around. But even after cleaning the heads the sound was still there. So I tried another deck. But first, I thought, I should clean these heads too. The act of which broke the 2nd tape deck. Sweet. Ok, fine. I'll try a 3rd tape deck. Ok, I think this sounds better. But let me switch tapes and see. At which point I discovered that the tape, which had finally been playing well, had actually broke while in the 3rd deck. Well, do I still use this deck? Or is it destroying tapes? Shit, all this mechanical stuff is so easily broken. Why am I not running 3" CDr Gods? Well, I'm not giving up yet. I can go to my car, that is a reliable player even though the speakers are so bad. And yes, I was able to rely on that player. But it didn't clear up much for me about the whole warbly sound that started this chain reaction. Some of the tapes that previously sounded weird now has stopped sounding weird. Great. Some, on the other hand did not. Some of those that did not, seemed like maybe it made sense, in a psych-noise sorta way, that they should sound warbly. Other ones, being such lo-fi recordings from boomboxes, also made sense. And a 3rd catagory of them just seems plain wrong. But really, it was too hard to tell. And since this had now taken a few hours to go through, plus destroy at least 2 of my tape decks, I was completely frustrated. I had not actualy paid attention to any of the music. I had not enjoyed myself. And it was all because of this ridiculous fucking complicated ass medium known as the cassette. Too much mechanics, in both the medium and playback mechanisms. Too much to go wrong, both when the music was dubbed and when it plays back. Oh, so very annoying. Tapes suck.

Right?

Well, listening to my 300+ pile of scratched cdrs isn't really much better. And after a few days of just forgetting about tapes it suddenly struck me: All my tape decks are dieing because I dubbed over 900 tapes in the month of December. A little rough on those puppies. And when else in my life have so many cassette-related problems all come to me at once? Never, and maybe never again. So I chill and continue on loving cassettes. Faults and all.

- Brian Miller