// cassette edition — signal // noise (first run, 20 units planned)
A small experiment in making a record you can hold but never stream.
Got the provisional quote back today for a short run of twenty cassettes — black/white sandwich shells (Side A: white / Side B: black), on-body printing, clear cases, full J-cards. A physical split to mirror the internal one: digital-left / analogue-right, printed directly into the plastic.
This run is intentionally tiny. Partly a proof-of-concept for a future Kickstarter (vinyl, maybe even VHS music videos), but also a way of testing what a museum-object version of signal // noise can be.
The core rule remains: no digital release.
You can touch it, rewind it, mishear it — but you can’t link to it.
Each tape will be mailed out in a black bubble mailer, wrapped in a continuous dot-matrix scroll from Process Zine #00 (printed on the OKI). Inside the cassette case:
— the full J-card
— a thermal-roll DSP diagram (receipt printer)
— a stray QLn420 label generated during early Second Copy tests
— another QLn label used as the actual address label
(All of this routed through Ezra / the Interpreter — artefacts of the machine, not merch.)
I’ll keep a handful. The rest will be sent to places that genuinely live in the intersection of sound, text, misinterpretation and glitch: Suno, The White Pube, The Quietus, The Wire, and a couple of others. Not as promos — more like dispatches from an experiment: objects carrying a signal the internet can’t hold.
No idea if anyone will actually “hear” it.
Maybe that’s the point.