大象传媒

Jennifer Lucy Allan continues our month-long celebration of the cassette, a format which was launched at the end of summer in 1963. Marking its sixtieth anniversary, we delve into our own collections to bring you playlists featuring favourite tapes as well as hearing from an array of Late Junction artists about how the humble cassette (and the portable recorder) has impacted on their artistic journeys.

In this episode, we share the first of our specially-commissioned Casseptember creations courtesy of Japanese composer and sound artist Aki Onda. Onda is no stranger to the cassette - he is perhaps best known for his ongoing work Cassette Memories, in which he uses a portable cassette recorder to make field recordings, creating a personal sound diary. He then uses them in live performances by manipulating Walkmans by hand, creating what he calls 鈥渁 sonic collage of ritualistic tape music.鈥� For Late Junction, he digs into his huge tape archive to rework recordings made during the formative years of his cassette practice, collaging sound snippets he made in New York鈥檚 East Village in the early 2000s.

Plus, the pioneering performance artist, musician and writer Cosey Fanni Tutti shares some of her own most treasured cassette memories. A tape-lover for six decades, she looks back on how they democratised music, as well as her time making cassettes as part of Throbbing Gristle. Plus, she shares how important cassettes were in her work as a striptease dancer in the late 70s, offering some of her top tracks to strip to.

Produced by Katie Callin
A Reduced Listening production for 大象传媒 Radio 3