Ready Cassette Go

A cutting-edge local label embraces a bygone medium.

by Shaun Brady

DEER DIARY: Deep Fried founder Marc Zajack releases his own music under the name Antler Piss. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

experimental

It's hard to find much love for cassette tapes in this day and age. They lack the hipster cachet of vinyl, the clean precision of the CD and the digital-age convenience of the mp3. For those of us who grew up toting Walkmans and punching Play and Record to make mix tapes, the cassette is little more than a nostalgic reminder filling a couple of shoeboxes in the closet.

Leave it to the experimental music community, where sonic perfectionism takes a back seat to the spontaneous manipulation of happy accidents, to embrace the cassette in all of its flawed glory.

"I like things that look old and sound old," says Marc Zajack, founder of the Philly-based Deep Fried Tapes label, which releases experimental music almost exclusively on cassette. "They have a visual history to them. I love going to thrift stores and finding a weird old cassette that looks like it's seen some shit. The amount of times you play a cassette or a record affects the sound — it's the physicalness of being involved in listening."

That combination of lo-fi audio and visual character reflects Zajack's own aesthetic. He performs music as a solo artist under the name Antler Piss and with the groups Sharks with Wings, Drunk Decade and George Steeltoe Ensemble, and collaborates with the dance and music ensemble PIMA Group. Prior to becoming involved in music, however, Zajack studied printmaking and sculpture at Kutztown University, so the physical presence of the tapes are as much a part of releasing them, and as much a part of the collaborative process, as the music itself.

"I'd like to have other artists do cassettes to see where they take it, so it goes through a couple people's hands and gets dirty. While the cassettes are definitely clean-looking — I'm not packing them in raw meat or wrapping them in hay — the idea of cassettes is dirty. It's got grit to it, it's got this primitive, dirt, trash sound."

Zajack started Deep Fried Tapes a year and a half ago as a way to document his own and his friends' activities. Since then he's released nearly 20 cassettes, as well as records made on his own lathe and a couple of CD-R/zine combos. His catalog includes releases from noisemakers Dave Smolen, Fritz Welch and Michael Thomas Jackson. One release, Peeesseye guitarist Jamie Fennelly's Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down, earned accolades from Byron Coley and Thurston Moore's Bull Tongue e-zine.

"I don't so much consider this a 'label,'" Zajack says. "It's more like an outlet. I don't put out just anything. I have a taste for what I'm interested in and what I want to represent. It just so happens that all my friends do really awesome stuff, so it's a no-brainer. I enjoy this type of music, I like making this type of music, and I want people to hear it. It's a primitive idea that matches up with a primitive aesthetic."

Zajack's own music, which tends toward the extremely harsh end of the brutal noise spectrum, is basically generated with synthesizers, noise pedals and tape manipulation. But Zajack lists "physicality and energy" as he runs down his setup, and gives the definite impression that these are far more important than any gear.

"To some degree I feel like it doesn't matter what you play," he says. "It's just putting yourself into the object that you're smashing or strumming or whatever you're doing. You have this inner energy that comes out when you make this sort of music. That is your instrument, that personal inner quality. That's a big part of my playing this heavy, harsh stuff. You incorporate your whole body, your mind, your breath, everything into improvisation. With these cassettes, I'm capturing that quality. I want these releases to resemble these people, these individuals, these groups, their energies and their bodies, their selves."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

More info at www.deepfriedtapes.org.