When the Internet and MP3s began taking off in the early 2000s, many hand-wringing critics believed the rise of digital media would spell doomsday for their physical counterparts. While that looks increasingly prescient for mainstream music, it's not true for every form of art; zine culture and audio cassette trading has actually been buoyed by the rise of the Internet, despite fading from popular consumption. People buy and sell zines online as readily as they'd order stationery, while cassette-dominant labels -- like Orange County locals Burger Records and Minnesota-based Night-People -- do so well that some of them have opened storefronts; they've also created Cassette Store Day, where local labels and collectors advertise on the Internet, then gather in DIY spaces to buy and sell cassettes. This resurgence within largely young, underground audiences proves that despite much ado about the death of physical media, many people -- at least in some subcultures -- still want actual, intimate contact with the culture they consume.
That belief in the intimacy of physical sound is a major touchstone of Brooklyn-based artist Becca Kauffman's project Master Cactus, an audio cassette magazine filled with field recordings, monologues, songs and avant garde sound art that documents the local scene where her band Ava Luna has been making music over the past few years. After releasing many of her recordings on her Life Spying tumblr, Kauffman decided to take it to the level by asking for submissions from artists, and curating them into her first issue of Master Cactus.
It all started with a simple question: If you could hear an art magazine instead of reading it, what would it sound like?
"I kept asking myself, 'Why do I like audio so much? What does that mean? What are the options available if you like that sort of thing?'" Kauffman told WIRED. While radio seemed like the most obvious form of distribution for audio, that daily pace wasn't exactly how she wanted to create or distribute her work. Instead, what made the most sense was the publishing schedule for a format very rarely associated with audio: quarterly magazines. "[That's] just my pace: You publish four times a year, and you have some time to really curate it."
Part of her inspiration was Tellus, the first successful publication formally known as an "audio cassette magazine." Founded in 1983 by noise composer Joseph Nechvatal, Carol Parkinson (now the director of nonprofit arts organization Harvestworks), and Claudia Gould (now the director of New York's Jewish Museum), Tellus was an experiment with the then-wildly successful cassette tape format. It presented curated cassette audio as art rather than simply music recordings, and collected poetry, drama, and avant garde audio into a portable, easily consumable medium. In its decade-long run, it ended up documenting the no-wave scene just like any alt weekly might have done — only better, because the noise was right there with you instead of words on a page.
Picking up the torch, Kauffman has created *Master Cactus *as a quarterly audio magazine "dedicated to audio experimentation, by and for all." Contributors for the inaugural effort were drawn, much like Tellus, from her own contacts in local music scenes, and include members of local Brooklyn scene staples like Twin Sister and her own Ava Luna – drummer Julian Fader, for example, submitted a super-cut of ascending strings in pop music – as well as East-Coast artists like New York performance artist Geo Wyeth and Boston's Krill. (You may not have heard of them yet, but few had heard of Butthole Surfers when their work appeared on Tellus in 1985, or Sonic Youth in 1988, either.)
Some of the artists who contributed had never experimented with sound beyond songwriting, but each track – from Hernandez's recording of his grandmother's singing voice, to the warped monologue "God's Balls" from Auckland-based composer Bill Baird – acts like a sonic a photo-collage spread, only alive. The intimacy and physicality of the cassette tape offers a different sort of experience than simply streaming a track; to Kauffman, they're the happy medium between the closeness of vinyl and the economy of CDs.
"There are tracks here that you have to listen and pay as much attention to as you would read an article," she says. "Part of the reason it's on tape is because [cassettes] are a couple of degrees removed from modern life. It's not supposed to be super into cassette culture, or obnoxious or exclusive. But it is a little bit challenging [on purpose]." To combat the big "everyone abandoned their Walkmans in 1996" problem, she says, some copies of Master Cactus will also be available with an accompanying used tape player—a package deal.
Issue No. 1 of Master Cactus is available for online pre-order now, and will be available in New York stores and online beginning this Friday, October 25; the tapes will come to Boston and Los Angeles later next month. Issue No. 2 is already slated for a release in March, and according to Kauffman, will feature contributions from New York comedians like Matt B. Weir and Bob Palos, Chicago-based music critic Jessica Hopper, and Fred Nicolaus of New York band (and Grizzly Bear predecessor) Department of Eagles. You can stream a few articles from Master Cactus Issue No. 1 below, but be warned: you won't get the full effect until you pop in the tape and press play.
Master Cactus Locations:
__New York City:
__Other Music
Deep Cuts Record Shop at the Silent BarnKim's Video
Earwax Records
Molasses Books
Human Relations
Book Thug Nation
Mellow Pages Library (for check out)
__Boston:
__Boomerangs
Deep Thoughts
__Los Angeles:
__Otherwild
UPDATE [10:42 a.m. PT, 10/22/13]: A previous version of this story referred Bill Baird's contribution to Master Cactus as "Godsballs." The piece's title is "God's Balls."
