The Mechanics Of Destruction | The Economy Is Screwed…

The Mechanics Of Destruction is an occasional cartoon strip for the times that we are living in….

The Economy Is Screwed

Tapeline

Sometimes in life there are beautiful moments of synchronicity that happen without planning every single move that you make. When I was drafting my last post the chance to visit Tapeline caught my attention so I jumped at it immediately it was just so timely given that I had wanted to publish something about collecting vintage audio cassette tapes. Stuart Childs AKA @Sc_r and I arranged to meet up to check out Tapeline after Stuart had made a couple of phone calls to Louise at Tapeline about the possibility of getting some cassette tapes made to order. We didn’t really know what to expect and had been speculating that the manufacturing unit was probably in someone’s shed, as luck would have it, it was to be much better than that but we were right about it being a family fun firm.

Tapeline: Alan, Louise and Taylor were initially bemused by our enthusiasm when we arrived but we got along like a house on fire and they were happy to let me take photographs, and Stuart and Aaron AKA @oomlout ask lots of techy questions about the machines and how the process worked. Stuart and I had a great time with Louise looking at every type of cassette body so that we could select the holders to wind the tapes onto, we both really liked the reel to reel spools inside the clear cassette body as it was very different to the standard tape. Taylor immediately ran off a test tape of chrome c60 on the Tapematic machine to see if we would be happy with the look when the tape was wound on the spools. We couldn’t believe our luck when we realised that Taylor would make up the tapes to order on the spot so we could take them away with us after we had used Alan’s PC to use paypal for the payment of the tapes.

Just as we were getting ready to leave we spotted some boxes of ‘endless tapes’ on a shelf in the office, it just kept getting better and better now I had spotted the holy grail of audio cassettes the endless tape loop in the cassette format. Needless to say we had to have some didn’t we, at this point our minds were racing at the thought of what we could do with endless tape loops my own version of heaven is a never ending throb of dub techno, my personal sonic utopia and possibly another person’s sonic hell.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Image

Freddy Robinson & His New Orleans Band

I’ve been looking for original gig posters for quite a while now to check the kind of look they would have had for when I’ve been producing my own posters, and recently came across this wonderful home-made poster in a second-hand record shop. I cannot tell you how excited I was when I found this bit of treasure, what are the odds of something like this surviving from 1953? The design is very much like the hand-made posters I used to make for Peterlee Catholic Club in the 70s for my Dad, so it’s kind of confirmed my vague recollections of what some of the working men’s club posters would have looked like at the time.

It would be lovely to know a bit more about Freddy Robinson & His New Orleans Band, probably local musicians and jazz fans, and who were the Jazz Information Service? That sounds like a great pseudonym in fact exactly like something I would have invented. I love so much about this poster even the old sellotape just about holding the two pieces of card together. If you do know anything about Freddy or The Jazz Information Service please contact me as I would love to hear from you.