PropertyOfZack Contributor Blog : : David Conway

propertyofzack:

PropertyOfZack is stoked to welcome back David Conway for his third Contributor Blog. David works both at The Working Group (MGMT for Never Shout Never, The Ready Set) and Doghouse Records (With The Punches, A Lot Like Birds), so to say he is busy is quite the understatement. In his third blog, David dives into the topic of buying records in stores and his love for cassette tapes. David recently started a new cassette label called Mokus Tapes, and this new blog helps explains his reasoning behind it. Check it out and read up!

I was re-organzing my man-room / office / guest room the other day and realized I have released a substantial amount cassette tapes through various channels in the past 12 months and I thought I’d sit down and try and figure out why.

In the early 90s, bowl-cut-me had already begun my descent into a life of complete, nerdy, financially debilitating obsession with music. I would save up my car washing money (later popcorn scooping money) and every other week head to the Record Town at the Hanover Mall (suburban MA what’s up?!) and spend hours and hours trying to decide which cassette would get my soapy cash. I remember vividly buying releases from Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Danzig, White Zombie and Blind Melon and then waiting anxiously to get home, pop it in my Sony Boombox and spend the next many hours reading over the album credits and lyrics and letting the tape loop again and again. I knew track 10 on those records just as much as I knew track 1. The format almost forced you to listen to an album as an album; start to finish, as the process of skipping tracks or finding the beginning of a particular song would most likely cause a nervous breakdown.

I think my reasoning behind putting out tapes again (We’ve done releases with La Dispute, Get Up Kids, Hot Water Music, Kurt Travis, Into It Over It, Candy Hearts, Never Shout Never, Weatherbox, Mansions, Jowls and more in the past little bit) comes from a few different spots. On the most selfish level, there is just a warming sense of nostalgia that comes from seeing these arrive. For grumpy-old-man-me, it takes me back to maybe a more pure time in music-listening (for me) when I felt like I had to sort of show a tenderness to the music I just bought instead of the neverending flow of mp3s and mediafire links which now attack our ears all day in a constant onslaught. We are already looking for that next album leak instead of trying to see what the artist was trying to accomplish on the album we just listened to for a few minutes and then moved on. Related to that, I think a reason I love doing this is because it does encourage the listener to sit and digest the entire musical piece. I think La Dispute’s WILDLIFE is an amazing statement. For me listening to it in my room, laying on my bed, start to finish on cassette just felt like the music was at home; like it needed to be on a clunky tape to be heard like it should be.

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