Look At These Tapes #11
5.17.16 by Tabs Out Crew
Look At These Tapes is a monthly roundup of our favorites in recent cassette artwork and packaging, along with short, stream-of-thought blurbs. Whatever pops into our heads when we look at/hold them. Selections by Jesse DeRosa, Mike Haley, and Scott Scholz.
Art by Joe Bastardo
[Borat Voice] You like my little piano, it's niiiice? You sit on very comfortable silk I play you song? [/Borat Voice] Joe Bastardo masterfully simulates the vibe of cheesy self-help tapes and other gems that make the best thrift store finds for Sam Gas Can's latest. Complete with faux wear-and-tear, an eye massaging color scheme, and the turtlenecked master of ceremonies place dead center, inviting listeners to lord knows what, "Plays The OP-1" is a perfect cover. There wont be a better Jcard this year or next.
Art by Keith Rankin
Cover art whiz Keith Rankin has a powerful, iconic style, but his design for this new Genetics and Windsurfing jam adopts a different direction than many of his orb-filled, "weird objects balanced in a cool landscape" pieces. Instead, we catch the redeye to a sort of industrial landscape with Giger-esque flourishes coalescing around its edges. And what better to illustrate nonlinearity than textures evoking perforated sheet metal, its structured honeycombs itching to become urban geodesic domes when the temperature of this intense music reaches the melting point? The tight shifts in the music are perfectly captured in cellular visual form. 
Art by Max Allison
Life may have you burning your candle at both ends, desperate to maintain balance in your life while juggling all your sources of stress. It's best to keep perspective - it could always be worse. You could be burning seven candles from either end while the monkey on your back ponders bringing everything to a crashing halt. But even then, you got some sweet threads, so, gotta ask, who's your tailor? Straddling the edge of reason never looked so fashion-forward.
Art by ?
The 'hand in a hole' trope has quite an exhaustive history, worked into countless thrillers and horrors, from classic slasher films to cheesy haunted house flicks. It has become so entrenched in our collective minds that its predictability inevitably yielded shtick for sitcoms and TV commercials. But none have subverted the device as much as Vitkova, whose new tape on Banh Mi Verlag disrupts the drain-gag set-up so entirely to deliver an improbable catalog of household-sourced jams - 8 tracks of vacuum cleaner drones and fan blade percussion, with a diverse range of appliances taking center stage.
Art by Jake Tobin
The fine and fancy folks at Truly Bald have taken the idea of the split cassette quite visually with their latest jam: I'm not sure who produces bowling pins and who turns out the dice, but one can only imagine the transcendent plastic polymers sizzling one floor above in that gigantic pipe. This cover also doubles as a phenomenal little 3-D animation over at the Truly Bald Facebook page, as whimsical and wild as the sounds found inside.
Art by E. Lindorff-Ellery and Sheryl Haws
The gorgeous letterpress designs found on most Notice Recordings tapes are always classy in their understated directness, but everything about this Chik White design especially pops. This one has the effect of a well-loved woodcut piece, perfect for illustrating music produced at sea in a vessel built by the artist. White's story of the musical and nautical journey recorded herein is included in a little booklet, featuring great shoreline sketches on its reverse.
Art by Iwona Jarosz
There is no lack of less-is-more / black-and-white / rando-shapes-and-lines artwork in the tape game, but something excites the senses a touch more when it comes to the Outlines label. I can't put my finger on it, but it's electric. Motionless in print, but still "fast" somehow, as if lines are going to rapidly shoot off of the paper like lasers. Or maybe that black ball will drop and begin to bounce with perpetual motion. The aliens that come to Earth to create crop circles - these are the mysterious crop circles on their planet. Blueprints perhaps? But what do they mean!?
Art by Joe Bastardo
Everyone's favorite elementary school-teaching, tape manipulating noisenik Mr. Stelzer is documented here on a journey to the South, dropping wild sets in sunny Florida. The artwork beautifully captures a sense of warmth and growth, while still alluding to the patinas, filters, and general heavy textures found in these live jams.
Art by ?
The series of events are as such: We started talking less on the phone and more on the internet. We came up with shorthand to let friends know that we were laughing (out loud). Years later that shorthand was printed on a t-shirt. A woman wearing that t-shirt killed the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim John-un with a toxin. She claimed that she thought it was a prank for reality TV. Within days a picture of her was the cover of a cassette tape. So, to sum things up, reality is fucking weird and folding in on itself.
Art by Steve Ramsey
For those who see a lot of cassettes produced at National Audio Company, you're probably familiar with opening a tape case to find side B facing you. It's a pet peeve of mine, to be honest, when I'd rather have the A side out and ready to play. Constellation Tatsu's new batch, however, features a fine set of vibrational patterns that wash all of the OCD manufacturing gently away.