Battle of the Bad
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Mark Reeve send me this cassette a few years ago. Mark has send me many cassettes that I treasure, but most contain spoken word. I have not written much about spoken word audio in this blog. The reason is that it is about ideas, especially esoteric ideas, and I have serious doubts about what can be said about this without distorting the original message. I have tried to write about esoteric ideas in the past, but the results were far from what I had in mind. So, for now, I will stick to the music.
The label of this tape says that a person named Aural Whammy has compiled this cassette, but I don’t know anything about her/him. There is no date on the label or tape, but based on the songs that are on it, I reckon it was made shortly after the Incredibly Strange Music books came out.
I hope that you can read the label, so you can see what a great tape this is. I have received and made hundreds of such cassettes with music from all corners of the audio world, but there are not many as good as this Best of the Bad compilation. Aural Whammy, or who ever did this job, had access to great records and very good taste.
I would love to have more information on this kind of compilation tapes and the people that made them. Some tapes turned into LP’s or CD’s later, but many did not. And in many cases that is a pity. I don’t mind listening to tapes, but of course I would prefer to have all this music on a vinyl record with some liner notes.
Here are a few minutes of side A of this tape. See the label for details!