I received a cassette in the mail back in December, a new release from Von Hemmling on Fox Pop Recordings, and my thrill at holding in my hands a brand new audio cassette, of all things, was gradually dampened by the realization that I had absolutely no way of playing it. That tape player in my boom box circa 1990? Plays cassettes too slowly, putting everything in downshift; which is fine, if you want to make albums sound a tad more druggy, but extended listening is queasy stuff, and could very possibly put you in a coma. My record player circa 1982, which has a built-in cassette player? For some reason it no longer likes to play anything through my computer’s sound card, and the player’s free-standing speakers circa 1976 are shot. And the 1998 car I’ve owned since 2004 has no cassette player in it, which is kind of astonishing to me, because weren’t they still selling cassettes in stores in 1998? Maybe not. I’m 32. Time seems to be telescoping recently, where what seems to be the very recent past is actually very long ago. That 1999 is ten years ago, and therefore I have been an Elephant 6 fan for ten years, is incomprehensible to me. It does not seem that distant that I was making mix tapes of the sort which are now nostalgically fetishized on different websites and in various publications; yes, students, we all made mixtapes on cassette players, laboriously editing one track after another, and then giving them to our crushes as if the whole delivered a very specific message. We would, and I would circa 1992-1997, make elaborate pieces of art for the cassettes, pieced together by scraps from magazines and glue, sometimes adhered directly to the plastic of the case, which didn’t look too attractive after a couple of years. I remember making a compilation of lounge music with Bettie Page and other tone-setting images on the cover. There was another comp I made in which all the songs were related in one way or another to UFOs (Rhino did the same thing as a box set later, too, with a few of the same selections), and still another in which I attributed all the found recordings to a fictional band called “A Thousand Dicks,” an in-joke for a friend. Even the simplest editing together of complete albums onto a 90-minute or 120-minute tape could make some slight statement, at least about the person who put them together. (I made a tape joining the soundtracks of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, claiming it was a “Sex Soundtrack, Where Even Jesus Gets Laid.”) And allegedly that’s how these mixtapes are supposed to endure, as statements of some kind or another about the assembler. But there’s still something attractive about the medium itself. Its compactness, its twisting tape grinding upon sprockets. The fact that you can rewind it and listen to the whistling of the tape threading back. It still has “sides,” like albums, so that records can be divided into two acts–cleverly, if the artist is so inclined. I would like to think that the first cassette I ever owned was the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World, which turned me on to Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, T-Bone Burnett, and Peter Gabriel, among others. But the truth is that it was probably Monty Python’s The Final Rip-Off, because I remember the wonder at purchasing it, opening the folds of the little sleeve and squinting to read the tiny, tiny liner notes, which were undoubtedly more legible in the CD version. And around that time I began my long-lasting obsession with the Beatles, purchasing Beatles cassettes, permanently linking, in my mind, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper with this portable plastic thing which wasn’t around when the original records came out. I do love vinyl, but the fact is that most of the records I bought as a kid were Disney “read along” story albums. By the time I got into music, our family record player had long since broken, and it was much later that I got it repaired and started a very modest collection of vinyl, which I treasure regardless. But I also love cassettes, in a more vital, ardent, absurd and unreasonable way. Mainly my love was because of the mixtape notion, which was appealing to someone who loved music but had no musical talent. I could make my own albums. I had other ways of expressing myself, but this was an outlet I enjoyed.
Cassettes have been eclipsed, first by CD-Rs, which I began utilizing as an updated medium for my mixtapes as soon as they became commercially available, and then, pretty rapidly, by MP3s. I was a late adopter of the iPod. My wife had one for years before I did. I still loved the CD, and loved that I could make my own; it just seemed so damn professional. (And of course, lossless audio file formats notwithstanding, I chafed against the idea of downgrading the quality of everything to fit it on my iPod.) And partially what I mean by the telescoping of time is that I just wanted more time to enjoy the CD-R format, to waste all those environmentally unsound discs, putting them in the mail for friends to tell them “this is what I listen to now; you’ll really love these bands.” That era should have lasted much longer. We tripped forward too quickly. Now I own an iPod, and I’ve crammed it with almost every CD I still own, and plenty more I possess in only digital and lossy format. I admit I love my iPod for its capacity and its convenience, and have nightmares of losing it. But the truth is that I don’t send out mixes to my friends anymore, because I know they don’t want CD-Rs. I don’t even use that Muxtapes thing either. It just is not the same. With MySpace and other streaming music sites, it’s far too easy for someone to discover their own niche of obscure or non-obscure bands, it’s no longer special to receive exposure to a band. And by “far too easy” I mean, of course, that it’s wonderful. Bittersweet too, because the mixtape has been replaced by the shuffling of songs, either by your iPod, or by robots like Pandora. I used to like to edit sound clips from film and TV, or recordings I generated myself, between the tracks of my cassettes and CD-R’s. (This led to the discovery that any random dialogue clip from “Sailor Moon” sounds like a porno.) Now a non-musician like myself needn’t bother with the time and effort to express myself creatively through an assemblage of sounds and songs, because after all the hours I’d put into it, no one would listen.
So with great surprise I felt this strange disorienting feeling upon holding a brand new cassette in my hands, You (Being My Body Whole), a new release from Von Hemmling, which is the long-underground recording project of Jim McIntyre (who was in The Apples in Stereo when they were known as just The Apples). All right, so I didn’t have a Proustian reverie, just a brief and mild sense of disorientation as to whether or not it was 1992. Then, when I could not find a means to actually listen to the tape (Not even in my car? Not even in my fucking car?), I sat and stewed for a while until Fox Pop very graciously sent me MP3s. So that I could listen to it on my iPod. You see.
So I listened, and while something is lost in translation, namely the very nostalgic platform by which I should be listening to these recordings, it’s the same Von Hemmling I enjoy. Much of the material has been made available elsewhere, either on singles, other cassettes, the VH website, or the out-of-print Wild Hemmling CD. These include “A Fine Appleseed,” “China Star,” and the excellent title track. But mixed in are plenty of different (new?) selections which I had never heard before, and which are quite good, in fact the best he’s ever done, such as the poppy “Intimacy Revealed” and “Dead End Suffering.” McIntyre’s material always seems to be in the demo stage, which is just fine when you’re a fan of that sound and the atmosphere it generates in a recording–that quality of someone playing with a 4-track in their bedroom. Almost every track begins with the preemptory tapping of drumsticks, followed by quavering vocals and guitar, and that’s about it as far as adornment goes. This seems appropriate for McIntyre, who recently released a CD consisting of 99 song ideas, some just a few seconds long; his work has always sounded stuttering, stumbling toward being born–and the songs themselves, appropriate to the style, often tackle themes of insecurity, hesitation, impotence, fatigue, or disappointment. Von Hemmling happily subverts pop expectations by using a soundscape choked with a feeling of thwarted fulfillment, and what better vehicle for thwarted fulfillment than an audio cassette released in 2009? VH’s recordings also sound, to me, like 1992, and that’s partly because of how McIntyre records, as though he were still trading Elephant 6 Recording Company tapes with his friends and fellow E6′ers.
It can be 1992 if you want it to be. But you may have to do what I’ll do now, which is venture out to find a new tape-player. It can sit next to my VCR in the basement (let me explain about VCRs).
Dan Efram has announced a contest to help design the new Apples in Stereo website. Details below (and in 
Random things happening around the world of Elephant 6:
For Valentine’s Day, eMusic has surveyed various indie rock musicians for 