What follows is an Artistic Justification of COIL MINE, elevating my hobby into the realm of the gods.
After years of moving ever closer to the back shelf of the record store, cassette tapes have essentially been eliminated from mainstream consumption. Like the eight-track before it, the medium has been purged by our society’s relentless forward momentum. Most cassettes would be discarded if not for the accommodating space of thrift stores and basements. Carelessly taped together and heaped into bins at the local Salvation Army, their sheer abundance has made their value insignificant. Unlike LPs, there is no vocal sub-culture dedicated to their preservation. Stuck together with a film of dust and Pepsi residue, only the distant prospect of a charitable buyer grants them any worth at all.
Now abandoned, for several decades cassette tapes were the most accessible way of recording sound. Long before the digital age, any thought, performance, event, or broadcast could be inexpensively saved and passed along within a small plastic box. But compared to the invisible, infinite space of the personal computer, the cassette only confirms its own awkwardness with a comparatively bulky size and lower sound quality. Yet these small machines with their internal mechanism, handy size, and palpable mass have an innate, physical value far surpassing any file lost in the Internet. As one of the last forms of non-digital documentation, cassettes are a tangible artifact of the past. Their contents cannot be easily cut down or searched in a database. They are mysteriously concealed within two reels coiled with pure un-encoded sound.
At first glance, most stores’ cassette collections seem saturated with duplicate copies of Flashdance, Destroyer, and every other top-twenty album of the last thirty years. But cutting through this mess of pop reveals a peculiarly marked assortment ranging from subliminal self-help recordings to worship services. Countless preachers, prophets, entrepreneurs, and storytellers have all contributed to this extensive cache of oral history. The rediscovery of such artifacts generates a prodigal fascination that amplifies every minor facet into allegorical pageantry and erases any imperfection into stylistic idiosyncrasy. After years of fermenting in dust, these exiled chronicles have become holy relics. This salvaging, this repossession of history is in itself an act of creation.
This investigation of cassette tapes directly corresponds with the legacy of collage and Found Art set in motion by Duchamp at turn of the 19th century. His employment of ordinary, “ready-made” items freed the potential of art. From that early start, artistic appropriation has become ever more detailed and refined. Within our inescapably referential post-modern culture, keen selection may now be the purest form of creation. Hip-Hop has demonstrated this superbly by weaving original themes of beat from phrases of reconstituted sonic thread. In this tradition, COIL MINE is a sideshow of sorts, an abstract storytelling through crackly black tape. From a smoke screen of ambiguous anachronism and deliberate juxtaposition, COIL MINE steals from the cassette an instantaneous fiction out of its own vestigial past, birthing a unique, reconstructed context.
