The other day, I was out at a park with my 4-year-old, when he suddenly bent over and picked something up. "Look at this toy truck, dada!" he said, struggling to figure out how to move the wheels. "How does it drive?"
He handed it over to me. It was a cassette tape containing Cher's 1989 album Heart of Gold. You know, the one with "If I Could Turn Back Time?" Whoever left it there in the park couldn't have planned it better, as I had to try to explain to my kid that actually, it's not a toy car, it's…where music comes from?
I thought of this as I perused TapeDeck.org, a new website created by graffiti artist / graphic designer Oliver Gelbrich, also known as neck, which catalogs and celebrates the art of analog cassette tapes. As neck explains on the site:
Tapedeck.org is a project of neckcns.com, built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette. There's an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60's functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70's audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80's and 90's. We hope you enjoy these tapes as much as we do!
Perhaps the most impressive thing about the site is how neck has cataloged it all. You can search for different tapes by brand, color, running time, even tape type. If you really want to reminisce, you can probably hunt down the exact 90 minute tape you used to make that baller mixtape that one time. Sure, playlists as cool, but the experience is nothing compared to the process of sitting and manually hitting "record" and "stop" as you listen your way through every single song and try to master the correct gap length of silence in between them.
You know you're going to go dig into those archives right now, don't you? Well, good luck; as of this writing, there are more than 900 different cassette tape designs featured on the website.
