Tapes 'n' tapes: the design triumph of 株式会社

Not content with recently sorting though hundreds and hundreds of old cassettes (see my post from er, two days ago), I've now taken such a shine to these clunky old things that I've put eight of them in a wooden frame I had lying around in the flat. Cool, no?

Do these belong in a tape deck or an art gallery?

Or another view ...

Dynamic, super precision, low noise, normal bias: eight tapes  

Yes, they might be humble TDK tapes bought haphazardly by yours truly for home taping purposes some 30-40 years ago, but they're also ... art. Or they are if I say they are (and I do). Anyway, I think it's worth taking a moment to look again at these common or garden tapes. It was only when I had a few hundred stacked up together on a table that I noticed how many different kinds there actually were. It seems that I slavishly bought TDK tapes (mostly C90s) for so many years that I went through numerous design types. These eight are a fraction of the varieties I have which must number at least 20-25 - some more here:

Solid or see-through, sir?

Design-wise, the general movement seemed to be away from the solid-shell type to the transparent ones, with variations within each basic type (see this site for a run-through of a bewildering variety of TDK tape types from 1966-2005, a real tape typology). Because my home-taping habit increased over time (an obsession deepening) I have a lot more of the later see-through ones and - probably because of their "scarcity" - I think I now have a preference for the more "antique"-looking solid designs. Or maybe, objectively, they're just aesthetically more pleasing? Of these eight, I think the top-left AD90 with its attractive silver and blue livery is the pick. Anyway, yeah, let's have a big hand for the design people at Tokyo Electric Chemical Industry Co. Ltd (or 株式会社 as I like to call it). I don't really know, by the way, why I ever went for TDK in the first place, but I know why I stuck with them - because that's how I am. Although I only got into tapes a few years after my first juvenile forays into record buying, it soon became a sort of article of faith: I don't BUY records, I RECORD them. Yeah, man, music anarchy in action. These days my home-taping days are long gone and I'm happy to buy pretty much anything (records, CDs, commercially-released tapes, CDRs, even the odd VHS tape), though only if it's cheap, meaning secondhand or at a decent price direct from a band. But the recent trend towards small bands putting out their demos on tapes has sort of brought things full circle. If I see an attractive little tape on a merch table I certainly won't buy it because it's a tape (I'd probably prefer a CD), but I'll definitely still consider it. In the end, though plastic is an inherently horrible substance in most instances, I reckon there's something strangely satisfying about these chunky plastic-y things with their miniature cogwheels and visible spools of tape. The shells have even got little screws (Phillips type) for that genuine industrial feel. Whatever else, they're non-sleek and resolutely anti-digital, so these days they're a sort of defiant anachronism. Meanwhile, when it comes to music the market always seems to have the last laugh. Back in the day I bought these tapes in bulk because they were cheap - a ten-pack used to be well under a fiver. Now I see specialist sites are selling them for - gulp - £7.99 per tape. One blank TDK C90 tape for eight pounds. What's the Japanese for "you must be fucking joking, mate"?