My Cassette Tape Collection

I suspect that sometimes my endless salvo of reviews may bore the average reader, therefore I'm going to try and mix it up a bit more by writing more interesting articles, sharing thoughts, reviewing more books and alcohol (possibly even movies too) and just showing off more metal stuff I own and what not. Firstly, will start with my cassette tape collection.

As a starting point I never really got into cassette tapes too much and have a very, very small collection of them. I suppose its a by product of getting into music in the early 90's when CDs were emerging as the dominant medium as well simply because I was too young to get into the tape trading thing, which I regret, but it wasn't until the late 90's that I got more into the underground stuff and by then it was already CDR's and Napster at that point and no one was into it. Well... maybe they were, but I didn't make any special effort to find them for some reason.

The four tapes you see above were the first ones I acquired, most likely sometime between '91-'93, and probably before I owned a CD player. They are Metallica's self titled album, which I had not listened to for well over a decade, but earlier in the year I did so and felt the insatiable desire to vomit up my entrails after getting no more than three songs in. I never finished the tape either. That album is truly that bad. On the other hand Guns N' Roses 'Appetite for Destruction' is one of my all-time favorite albums, as well the 'The Spaghetti Incident?' cover album is something I re-discovered this year having totally forgotten how good it was after not listening to it since the late 90's. And of course, 'Use Your Illusion II,' loved it as a kid grew to loathe 90% of it as an adult. Meh. If memory serves me I received this for my birthday in '92.

A triple threat thrash attack! Metallica's, 'Kill 'Em All' is within my top ten all-time favs and its even got the 'Blitzkrieg' & 'Am I Evil?' bonus songs, which my CD version lacks. This is another one I got in the early 90's and have some pretty crazy memories of air guitaring and rockin' out like a motherfucker to when I was in my early teens. Strange that I never made the natural move to play the guitar. The Atrophy and Sadus albums I bought in the late 90's or perhaps early 00's. Both are fantastic releases, especially the Atrophy, which is easily one of my favorite thrash albums. I seem to remember paying no more than $3-$4 for each of them.

Cathedral's, 'Supernatural Birth Machine' I sort of mistakenly bought about 3-4 years ago off of eBay while looking for the CD, in particular the European version since it had the normal rad Cathedral artwork. Turns out the seller was just selling the lame American version with the awful cover and no where was it indicated that it was a tape. Dickhead. At least I only paid a few dollars. The middle tape it the one and only demo from Sussurrus Inanis, a side project of Jason William Walton and Shane Breyer whom you may know from Agalloch. The music is neo classical based, sort of Dead Can Dance stuff and quite good. Apparently in the late 90's Cold Spring Records offered them a deal, but Agalloch was busy with 'Pale Folklore' at the time and the project was eventually sacked. I found this tape on eBay about ten years ago for a mere $6, which I suspect would go for triple or more the price these days due to Agalloch's a fame. The last is a Green Jelly tape, which I bought somewhere in the early to mid-90's when the Carnage/Spider-Man something or other video game for Super Nintendo came out and used one of their songs as music within the game.

One of my own custom creations, 'The Castlevania Symphony of the Night' Soundtrack. I grew up adoring video game music and had the odd habit of recording music from my games since I enjoyed it so much. Of course this was before the internet and before I had any other means of obtaining the pricey soundtracks from Japanese stores overseas. Naturally the quality was awful since I'd just set a tape deck next to the TV and hope for the best, but it was always a struggle since my parents would walk in and disturb my progress on various occasions or if I just made a simple movement it might be recorded. I remember the first time I recorded was around '92, capturing music from Final Fantasy II, and when I went back to play it I noticed sounds of soda cans being opened as well as chips being munched on. Fuuuuuuck! Anyway, for this particular one I must have been pleased with the results since I went through the trouble of actually making artwork for it. Curiously, this was the late 90's when I had internet access and could have ordered the real deal CD soundtrack. But, I didn't.

Okay, so I did do some tape trading, but only once. It was with this guy named Alex from Germany who at the time (2002) was writing for LH as well as releasing his one and only album from his new band, Cremation. Previously he had played bass in Dark Fortress, but left just before recording the massively awesome debut, 'Tales from Eternal Dusk.' In any case, he hooked me up with some Dark Fortress demos, which were really interesting as well as some Amestigon stuff since he was friends with them and I believe the entire Strid discography. Great stuff. I have absolutely no recollection of what I committed to tape for him though.

Over the eleven years of Lunar Hypnosis' existence I've received exactly three promo tapes from bands. The first one is from the atmospheric ambient black metal band, Spectral Lore, which you'll be seeing more of on this 'zine soon enough. The tape's limited to just 250 copies and with the band starting to get a bit more attention this could be considered a collectors item of sorts. The following two tapes come from the bands A Forest & Darkness. I haven't listened to these since I received them (probably 5-6 years ago), but I recall them being fairly straightforward and somewhat decent raw black metal. Guess I should give 'em a go once more.

My three most recent tape arrivals have been Falls of Rauros', 'Revisitation,' which gathers together the bands first album and EP, which were originally just released in mp3 format. The tape is limited to just 60 copies, which means I really do have some kvlt material. The label I bought the FoR tape from required the purchase of at least two tapes, and since they're arsenal seemed to be nothing but raw and NS black metal demos I'd never heard of, I picked up Northaunt's, 'Barren Land,' which is one of the finest dark ambient projects out there. The last one is Baphovomit's one and only demo, 'Defecating Upon the Holy Trinity,' which you may recall me reviewing a few months back. It was gifted to me by my buddy who plays in the band, Kommander Wulfen. Take notice of the fact that the case is crushed too. This happened because the TSA searched my bags upon returning to the USA and apparently they had to make sure I didn't have any explosive black metal demo tapes in my backpack. Officer Branden unfortunately had the butter fingers and dropped the tape. Mother fucker!

The very last tape in my collection is another creation of my own, which also involved my younger brother. In the early 90's we used to do an improv comedy sketch of sorts that was greatly influenced by Saturday Night Live, but more specifically their Wayne's World bit. Essentially we created characters and just ran with them and by some strange occurrence we came up with some stuff that was actually really funny, even today parts of it make me smile. However we were basically just little kids as I recall most of it was recorded before even 1996, which was when we officially made the tape. Therefore, most of the time you're dealing with two kids with kid voices making stranger voices and usually taking about a variety of naughty topics. There were also a few odder pieces I created on my own which were really just a cut & paste of samples from movies and music, sometimes overlaid on each other to make them all the weirder, but it was neat. I know collectively we had several other recordings but nothing official ever came of them. This here is a real special tape too, its #1 of 1. You can top that cultness! Maybe its a shame that we never experimented more with the concept and as I recall the whole thing died by the late '97 or '98 when I was already in high school.

Yes, we even made artwork

And that is all the tapes I own. I suppose I could of at any time collected more, but I guess I just always preferred CDs and vinyl over tapes. I'd imagine from time to time I will buy more as I do enjoy hunting for old thrash and death metal tapes at second hand stores and I'm sure some band will likely send me more for promo reviews too.