Corey Pierce

In his keynote address at the 2007 South by Southwest music festival and conference, David Byrne gazed into the crystal ball and predicted the following trends for the future of music: artists jumping ship from major labels to indies (or simply self-releasing), the continued rise of the download, the steady decline of the CD and the return of the more collector-centric vinyl. Two years later, art-rock’s Nostradamus has been proven correct on every count.

However, what Byrne failed to latch upon was the arrival and revival of additional alternative formats in the underground, such as cassette tapes, 7-inch records, CD-Rs, 3-inch and business card CDs, 8-tracks, USB strips and countless other object-fetishist curiosities. Vinyl, it would seem, is only the tip of the tangible iceberg.

In Canada and the U.S., labels such as L.A.’s Not Not Fun, New York’s Woodsist/Fuck It Tapes, Iowa’s Night People, Montreal’s They Live We Sleep, Toronto’s Bruised Tongue and Vancouver’s Isolated Now Waves are releasing a seemingly unending stream of cassettes. Back in this neck of the woods, Red Deer’s Kevin Stebner has recently launched the tape-only imprint Bart Records.

As a solo artist and the former member of bands such as Benalto, To The Teeth/To The Hilt, Stebner’s interest and commitment to off-kilter music is well established. However, with stylishly packaged (and sweetly scented) releases from Calgary’s Draft Dodgers and Edmonton’s Bayonets!!! and Gift Eaters, plus plans for a compilation of now-defunct acts from across the country, it’s his enthusiasm for unearthing artifact sounds that’s truly impressive.

“My original idea was to put out stuff that wouldn’t get put out otherwise,” Stebner explains. “For things that wouldn’t really be viable to press as 300 or 500 records, I can do 100 tapes, and they’ll all get into people’s hands.”

“Tapes are the people’s format,” he continues. “They’re cheap, small and functional. Prior to CD burning, it was the only way you could copy music. Plus, they’re often hand-assembled, and you always feel like you’re listening to something that no one else really is. But it’s beyond novelty, and I actually believe that cassettes have a higher quality sound than MP3s.”

Chloe Lum of Montreal noise rockers AIDS Wolf finds another value in the do-it-yourself approach of alternative formats. Instead of being burdened with the red tape of an “official” release, they can simply self-record on four-track in their practice space, dub the songs onto a cassette or CD-R, and have a physical product instantaneously.

“We were planning to have an EP ready for this tour, but our label told us that they had too much other stuff already slotted, and that it would have to wait for a couple months,” says Lum. “When we put out a tape, we don’t have to co-ordinate with any distributors’ release schedules, or have lead-time to send it out to college radio stations. We can make it and just have it.”

Like many heavy hitters in the Alberta music community, Garrett Kruger plays both sides of the music industry field. Along with drumming for Edmonton rock duo The Famines, he’s also the founder of Put Out The Jams Distro, a one-stop shop for hard-to-find releases in all variety of formats. You’ll find Kruger sitting at a table with a hefty box of tapes, CDs and vinyl at most gigs in the City of Champions, and he slings his wares online at putoutthejams.com.

That passion has bled over into his band, too. The Famines’ releases to date include a double 7-inch, a cassette and even a highly sought after 8-track. All of these come topped off with guitarist and singer Raymond Biesinger’s striking typefaces, art and design, an element of the physical release that many casual downloaders tend to forget about. Pushing this concept to perhaps the illogical extreme, The Famines’ next offering will be a cassette tape bundled with a 268-page book.

“There’s a fine line between audiophile nerdism and a manifesto of releasing only analog records,” says Kruger. “I personally just like the way vinyl sounds. If I go to a show, see a band that I like and buy their CD, it’s basically just a medium between money being exchanged at a merch table and songs ending up on my iPod. Raymond and I came to a conscious decision that if we’re going to be releasing something where the art has so much to do with the meaning and the whole minimalist esthetic that we have, we wanted it to be encompassed in the entire release.

“When we released the 8-track, I thought a few collectors would buy them and maybe some drunk guy would think it’s hilarious and show his dad,” he continues. “But people were actually really enthusiastic! We sold them all in the first two months of it being out.”

Edmontonians aren’t the only ones contributing to the fun. Back in Calgary, the last few years have seen a steady string of 7-inches from the likes of The Skitzos!, Pine Tarts, The Cryptomaniacs, The Incandescence, Woodpigeon, The Mother Fuckers, Rebels United, The Summerlad and I Die Screaming, as well as Pizza Records’ four-way split with tracks from The Ostrich, The Fun-Funs, Thee Thems and Hazard Lights, and The New Black Records’ recent Mad Cowboys/Colin Decker Free Fall split release. Braden Funchner has released his Duthie Birthday Demo on cassette and This Old Tape on CD-R (cheeky!), and most specialized of all, oddball rock trio Friendo offer their Friendemo CD-R packaged in an envelope with a personalized illustration of each person who buys it.

Peter Redecopp, however, has them all beat. On top of founding 403 Noise, a local collective dedicated to experimental art and music, he curates the monthly Discord performance series at Emmedia (next event: April 25) and has also offered up the ear-splitting sounds of his solo project RDC on oddball formats such as split cassettes, CD-Rs and three-inch and business card CDs.

“I try to release stuff fairly frequently, so I like the smaller formats because they usually only fit five to 15 minutes of material,” Redecopp explains. “They’re definitely more of a fetishized object for collectors, more of an art piece than something practical. A lot of my stuff is also available for download, but the physical releases are always in limited runs and will only be released once.”

“I really like these formats, simply because they can’t be duplicated endlessly, and much like noise, they go against what we’re naturally inclined to. I read somewhere recently that people prefer the sound of MP3s just because that’s what they’re used to, but not me. For listeners who are more interested in abstract sounds or are more attentive to subtlety, a lot of that gets lost with digital releases.”

For Jay Sinclair of The New Black Records, environmental concerns come into play as well. He argues that online interactions and digital media can equal the experiences of the outside world, and that’s one reason why the label originally planned to release their music purely on USB strips. Now, they’ve come up with an even more sustainable practice.

“As a leftist environmentalist, the cool thing with digital technology is that it’s less product and packaging being used,” Sinclair says. “Vinyl can be made with tons of recycled materials nowadays, but when we looked into USB strips, we realized there’s a lot of plastic and you often have to buy them in bulk. Instead, we developed software that enables people to access all kinds of content for bands—not just music, but also gig posters, live footage, photos, etc. Instead of creating more waste, there are companies giving away USB strips, so we plan to set up a laptop at shows and allow people to fill up their own for a fraction of the cost.”

Cecil Frena, Gift Eaters bassist, solo artist and the brains behind Edmonton’s all-ages art space The Hydeaway, looks at alternative format releases from a historical perspective. To him, vinyl and cassettes have always gone hand in hand with punk rock culture, and are an important aspect of the do-it-yourself philosophy.

“Because the cassette is a format that’s inconvenient to use, in an odd way it actually serves a kind of counter-cultural purpose,” Frena explains. “There’s a connection between punk rock and cultural subversion, so now that tapes are becoming ‘cool,’ a lot of people in the punk world will probably jump ship.”

In the end, a sentiment that’s echoed amongst almost everyone interested in alternative formats is the significance of the personal touch and the sense of community that they help inspire and maintain. Rather than simply amassing files on a computer, Stebner values real-life relationships between like-minded music fans that he fears might be fading away in the download era.

“I’ve basically gotten to know the Gift Eaters just because I put out their tape,” says Stebner. “Making new friends through analog formats is far more important than any amount of money.”