In summer 2022 I bought a used, 100-minute, Maxell Metal Capsule tape so I
could test recording to a metal-position tape (Type IV) tape, which I hadn't
done yet. The tape arrived unsealed but also totally unlabeled, and I
expected that it might have been erased before it was sent to me, but I
decided to try playing it before recording it anyway, and found that the
recording quality was pretty good and that the music sparked my interest.
Ultimately I listened to the whole thing and cataloged its content. I don't
speak the languages sung sung on this mixtape at all, and with no labels to
go from I relied on services like SoundHound and Shazam to identify the
music. I was able to identify all but two tracks on the tape this way. I
digitized just these two tracks before I recorded onto the tape, as I knew
the rest of the music was availabale online.
contents
side A
不要走不要走 (1988 album) by 潘美辰 (Taiwanese singer Pan Mei-chen)
(Youtube
playlist)
Because of the way the tape was wound when I got it, I listened to Side B
first. Adia Chan's album on that side starts with a sort of MIDI harmonica
sound that put me in mind of the segment of Erasure's 1993 concert video
The Tank, the Swan, & the Balloon where the stage is dressed
in a camp-country theme, with Andy Bell donning chaps and a cowboy hat.
Overall, I was struck by the mix of genre influences I was hearing. Country,
disco, Chinese classical, and even tango sounds are very deliberately evoked
on various tracks, while the whole thing maintains a very crisp 1990 digital
sound. This is from that era when distinctly digital-sounding MIDI
instruments were still novel in a backing track, and used with abandon in
this sort of pop production, but Auto-Tune did not yet exist for processing
vocals. This mixture of grand digital orchestration with and powerful,
unaltered human lead performances gives the whole thing a quality of
disarmingly genuine emotiveness.
The Pan Mei-chen album that starts Side A is less freewheeling in its genre
influences and stuck to a pleasant late-eighties rock/pop ballad format,
though often with the same sort of reverberating digital bells and string
orchestration that I heard throughout Side B. Pan Mei-chen's vocals have a
huskier, earthier, more rock sensibility than Adia Chan's classical
virtuosity. The compositions throughout the album have a mildly wistful cast
to them. Listening to them makes me feel as though I'm being driven home the
roller rink in the back of my parents' minivan in the '90s.
The first unidentified track is a moderately upbeat ballad with vocals that
start out understated but then crescendo to emotional peaks. The synth bells
in the background instrumentation remind me somewhat of Joe Hisaishi's work
on the My Neighbor Totoro soundtrack, while elsewhere the backing
instrumentals are more standard soft rock stuff. But there's a short,
explosive, synth pad break before the last verse. I would totally slow-dance
to this.
Whoever programmed the drum machine on the second unidentified track went
totally nuts and I am living for it. I think the orchestration on this one
is entirely MIDI. There's a highly energetic keyboard break, some crazy
synth timbral shifts, and even a brief moment where the where it evokes a
vaguely-Egyptian plucked string sound like you might hear in a third-rate
documentary on Tutankhamun. I'm not great at recognizing vocalists, but I
think this is the same singer as on the previous track. However, this one
is a totally different format and much faster. Well-suited to a workout or
to decorating your airy new apartment in a movie montage.
不再难过 is another slow and sentimental ballad, this one with both synth and
some brooding power guitar riffs. Good music for indulging in a modicum of
self-pity while walking through a rain shower.
recording
I did end up recording over the tape, since I had acquired it to test out
its recording functionality in the first place. I did set my cassette deck
to Type IV recording, but ultimately when I tried to raise the input levels
to match the high output levels of the existing recording, the result had a
noticeably poorer signal-to-noise ratio and greater distortion than what I
was recording over. I suggest that this is down to me using a low-end
consumer deck from the '80s that lacks any form of fine tape bias
adjustment. I noticed that the original recording on the tape also seemed
compressed, though it sounded intentional to me, like it was mastered with
a high level of compression for vinyl pressing or radio play. For the most
part the clarity was pretty good to my ears, though I'm not much of an
audiophile.
In summer 2022 I bought a used, 100-minute, Maxell Metal Capsule tape so I
could test recording to a metal-position tape (Type IV) tape, which I hadn't
done yet. The tape arrived unsealed but also totally unlabeled, and I
expected that it might have been erased before it was sent to me, but I
decided to try playing it before recording it anyway, and found that the
recording quality was pretty good and that the music sparked my interest.
Ultimately I listened to the whole thing and cataloged its content. I don't
speak the languages sung sung on this mixtape at all, and with no labels to
go from I relied on services like SoundHound and Shazam to identify the
music. I was able to identify all but two tracks on the tape this way. I
digitized just these two tracks before I recorded onto the tape, as I knew
the rest of the music was availabale online.