...progology...

Well 1st thing to say about my cassette is that it took a circuitous route to reach me, via the downstairs neighbours of my x-roomy on the other side of town then dropped off by hand by his kind partner, all of them apparently charmed by the polite hand written cover letter accompanying the tape, as was i, which courteously explains that the tape itself also had a circuitous route to compilation, involving travelling to another whole city to access appropriate equipment, which in turn affected the selection by way of limiting the available discs for the compiling

(& i'm not even gonna mention the trials & tribulations involved in making the cassette i sent off on a trans-continental journey to my brave recipient, (as i indulged in a lengthy moaning diatribe in my tracklist/cover note) in the end the best way of making this accessible to me would have been to just rip the whole lot onto mp3 - i hate to say it, & i won't reveal now whether i restrained myself due to purist ferrite love principles or just that it didnt occur to me til later.ok?)

i am very happy to report that all tracks on cassette were 100% new to me, as well as almost all of the artists - this is ideal, so i made sure to listen a few times without referring to the track list, let the sounds merge and the sonic rinse wash thru my brain 'dolby no' on C20 'personal stereo cassette player' off my mum down in sunny piltonistan... later on i sought a 'sanyo' equipment from my good colleague marcia which has facilitated me to listen to the tape a good few more times, checking the tracklist and paying a fair amount of attention ... enough to get a clear idea of my favorite moments (& those to hit the old >>ff button) find myself occasionally humming songs to myself at inopportune moments far from the venerable 'cassette playing apparatus'

some highs and lows:
some lovely moments and some persistent earworms there ... the zombie drumsong has been rotating around my brains today with a flavour of rotting calypso and echos of slavery and sickly sweet sugarcanes - my vision of a foetid Belafonte was not so far from reality as it turns out the song is by a yankee soap actor

the tape opened extremely well - it hit me with a bit of droning zurna that discordant pipe that always starts my juices swilling o yes - the first track comes up like a turkish grimly fiendish - very taking themselves seriously sounding vocals over baroque hevvy metalesque groove, (gratifyingly when I checked out this track the auteur was 100% EXACTLY as my minds eye visualized him….)

o yeah
now, getting down to the nitigriti of reviewing brings me face to face with my own wilful ignorance about musicology, i've always enjoyed music that is amorphous and somehow approached it with an aggressively anti-trainspotterish attitude. what i always preferred was a mixtape compiled by my mate with a tub of ja 7" - no popstar pictures on the covers, untraceble versions, producers without oeuvre so that the id of any actual 'author' just dissolves and is left irrelevant by glorious and mighty confusion of riddims and dubplates, obscurity as strength (his handwriting more indecypherable even than my beloved compiler of this tape). Later on in the irresponsible music voyeur's career i loved the house mix tape from down the market; shouty mcs sprawling over beatmatches without end or beginning... nextly came cassettes ripped off pirate junglist fm: nameless tracks that break in the charts 18 months later, bigshoutouts but no bother of trackid & certainly noones getting any royalties…
into the 21C in this favored planet of mankind we encountered the mp3, the mp3blog and the scourge of p2p - further anonymising tracks into luscious muddles of inconsistent & incompatible id3tagging, wholesale looting of catalogs introduces another motive for assault on authorship and ownership, disruption of decades of discography in favor of whatever you can find on demna, 6arab, matsuli, mazika, bennloxo, barefiles - slsk's bland interface rendering track id down to:
filename.mp3
yumyum. burp

scuse me

so, after my initial impressions of some nice bits (and some sore points) i followed up by delving into google...where I was quite ambushed by a musicological revelation: it seems that the selection is mainly from the genre known as 'prog'.
interestingly i have up til now zero acquaintance with 'prog' at all, but this inspired & intrigued me, i was particularly impressed by the age of the music which was all a lot older than what i'd thought; some tracks i'd assumed retro actually were in fact futuristic,

having browsed several prog resources (via guru woebot) &updated& backdated my prog ology after this rude revivalist introduction to the new/old world of prog, i dug up my cassette player from 1995 in the hope of new insights re-visiting the selection thru the lens of prog vision (marcia's apparatus having been reclaimed) but the tape decks are hopelessly clogged & the machine is good for nothing but pirate radio :)

another high
was what i sounded to me like afro funk mixed to afropop on side one mmm lush - one of them includes one of the few female vocals in the selection, (erm why no girls in prog? a mustache thing??) the geographical distribution of the artists impressed me as i'd no idea of the internationalist scope of the prog konspiracy. these tracks turned out to be from Indonesia & by son of asha bhosle.

a theme of nostalgic not quite gothic and not quite psychobilly-ish flavour thruout, always sounding modernist, often using drum machines, electro rather than guitar, some synth and some solid electronica beats, some rocking theremin, peppered with some few tracks of standard soulful blues/r&b that sounded older than the rest & a bit incongruous

one track which made me feel strongly ambivalent opened with a heavily u2 sounding vocal (=cha!) moving along over some very cheeky fluting, side 2 starts with a very suicide-sounding black safari with some satisfying animal sounds uh uh then the selector comes thru with some longer more houseical tracks - one particularly agreeably sleazy number dribbles me right back to tha 90s with a very moist 'just for tonite baybeee' chorus that almost got to italo, moving to some sounds that are rather zappatistic, a classic can style blisssed out explosion leads us into an espanol version of nancy sinatra's bangbang - yes we liked that mix thankew

definitely the low point was that grim vocal on 'leave the driving to uuusss' that song brought me dooown, with it's failed teen hollywood diva yuppie nonsense vocal - it did however drop me into a deep reminiscence down a memory-rabbithole as follows:
a very early memory of the dawn of home video culture watching the wiz of oz and some oldskool dizney kartoons on what i can remember as gurt chunky cassettes in some type of wall-mounted playa type gizmo - this fragmentary recollection of the early 70s cutting edge techno before the vhs/betamax format wars the re-surfacing of this long-suppressed intrusive prog recollection is somehow an interesting meditation in terms of this project marking the ARES END OF KASSETTE KULTURE.
cheers'en