Perfect Sound Forever

OPEN REEL

on the right: Photomontage advertising London's Tape Recorder Centre. Author's collection. (1960)

A magnetic story of the 1950s and 1960s
An excerpt from The Third Annual
by Elodie A. Roy
(December 2025)


NOTE FROM FRANS DE WAARD: Korm Plastics is proud to announce The Third Annual, our latest magazine cum yearbook covering a wide scope of musical interests, including Kora Pandit, extreme metal, music from the Islam on vinyl, Decoder movie, Das Wesen, Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac) in Germany, Cro Magnon, Backstreet Records and much more. From Perfect Sound Forever, we reprinted Scott Bass' article on Hozac Records. As a teaser, here's Elodie A. Roy's article on Tape trading clubs in the 1950s.

The 1950s were the age of 'brown goods' - the trade term used to describe the consumer electronics that began accumulating in Western houses at the time. Record players, radios and television sets belonged to the family of brown goods - so did the heavy, infernally bulky reel-to-reel tape recorders. By the mid-1960s, with over two million tape recorders' owners, Britain constituted the country with 'the highest percentage of households with a tape or cassette recorder' in the world, according to British electronic musician, tape historian and underground filmmaker Ian Helliwell. Helliwell has produced the only comprehensive study to date about early electronic tape culture in the UK - a book entitled Tape Leaders: A Compendium of Early British Electronic Music Composers.1

As part of his tape archaeology, Helliwell recovered hundreds discarded figures of British electronic music. He celebrated the uncool and the defiantly marginal - and all those who never deliberately chose the path of marginality but simply fell between the cracks.

One such forgotten figure was the engineer and experimental musician Fred Judd (1914-1992), also the topic of Helliwell's feature documentary Practical Electronica: The Sound World of F.C. Judd. The film, completed in 2011 and predating Tape Leaders, shows how Judd infiltrated amateur tape publications to spread his magnetic gospel - introducing thousands of readers to the art of tape recording. As well as writing for the amateur press, Judd ran the independent record label Castle (releasing some of his own sound effects and electronic music). In 1963, he was commissioned to make all the music and sound effects for ITV's series Space Patrol (written by Roberta Leigh) - a sci-fi puppet show aimed at children that was the earliest TV series in the UK with a full electronic score.

Judd was almost an exact contemporary of Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995), the celebrated pioneer of musique concrète - but while the latter has achieved international fame, the former has sunk into oblivion, remaining a mere footnote in the history of electronic music.

More generally, while the story of the cassette underground has been told many times, relatively little exists about the amateur (and semi-professional) reel-to-reel tape scene of the 1950s and 1960s (Helliwell's book aside). I wonder why the open reel has been so neglected - although part of me isn't surprised. I suspect that the small, daintily self-contained cassette tape is a much cooler object. Cassettes circulate easily. They get passed from hand to hand. They are small, mobile cultural forms - and they seem to have a curious, vivid life of their own. Indeed, part of their appeal lies (for Thomas Bey William Bailey) in their anthropomorphic quality. In his 2012 book Unofficial Release, Bailey writes about 'the tape's spools seeming staring back at the user like a pair of inquisitive eyes, with their tiny plastic spokes for "eyelashes."'

Tapes appear to be human - and they reinforce human connections, networks and communities. In the 1970s (and well into the 1990s), cassettes constituted the main listening format in Latin America, Algeria, Tunisia and Sri Lanka (a country that, in 1981, boasted a market of over two million cassettes - most of which were imported by tape dealer/guru Atu Moolchand aka Cassette King). In Algeria, raï exclusively circulated on tape (both within and outside the country), while Jamaica exported reggae to London shops mostly via tape.

Cassettes make scenes. They start cults.

Among the books that have celebrated them, I'm thinking of Robin James' edited book Cassette Mythos (1992), documenting the history of the cassette network and the home studio in the US - from basements, bedrooms and garages to the world. The following decade, when tape had almost disappeared, Thurston Moore published Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (2005). I remember buying it from the Foyles bookshop in London on a scorching hot summer day. Back in my small hostel room, I started poring over the personal stories, track lists and photographs the book contained, remembering all the tapes I had exchanged over the years - a bittersweet memory, as the age of tape seemed gone for good.

Fast forward another decade, and to my incredulous delight cassettes were suddenly back, apparently to stay.

Today, many new albums have a digital- and cassette-only release. In his recent book Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (2024), Rob Drew covered the full life of tape, traveling from the early cassette underground, to issues of piracy, magnetic aesthetics, and the contemporary tape revival. Analogue culture has become hip again. As well as a return to analogue formats, the 1970s and 1980s experimental tape scene has been revived - with the rediscovery of groups/collectives such as Zoviet France, Vox Populi!, Normil Hawaiians, Bourbonese Qualk, to name only a handful of acts whose works have been reissued in the past years.

The art of reel-to-reel recordists has yet to be revived in the same way. For now, it still lingers on the periphery of cultural awareness. It is not hip enough. It belongs to the beige, slightly soporific world of postwar households. When I think about the 1950s, the decade when tape recorders began appearing in houses, I think of shiny kitchen appliances, dainty floral curtains, tidy, well-appointed gardens - a realm of sexual and social conservatism. I think about food rationing, substitute coffee, and Tupperware gatherings on drab, endlessly rainy afternoons. The 1950s also bring to mind visions of progress - the dreams of socialism, the genuine attempts at building a fairer society - with the establishment, in Britain, of the welfare state and the nationalisation of key industries. The 1950s were a divided decade, wavering between a sedate, quaintly conservative mood and one of radical invention. People did want to break free. To try something else. To change life.


A Serious Art

In music and the arts, there were revolutions brewing too - a move towards formalism and abstraction, combining with a desire to embrace the deep, textured materiality of media (be it paint or magnetic tape). Experimental forms of music-making were developing, most notably musique concrète, a practice that began in France under the impulsion of electroacoustic composer Pierre Schaeffer, and soon consolidated as a fairly conventional mode across the nascent world of experimental music. Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) was formed in 1958 to formally explore, amongst other things, the possibilities of composing with tape. At this point, musique concrète already received solid institutional support in France: the GRM evolved from the 'Groupe de recherches de musique concrète' Schaeffer had founded in 1951 within the Radio-Télévision française. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop (RW) was created in the UK in 1958 as a response to the French GRM.

Tape was the key medium within radiophonic, experimental circles, starting with John Cage's "Williams Mix" (1952/1953), his first composition for tape recorder. It was a laborious, intricate sound montage. The 192-page score showed eight lines, one for each track of magnetic tape. In 1962, Cage remembered that the lines were 'pictured full-size so that the score constitutes a pattern for the cutting of tape and its splicing. All recorded sounds are placed in six categories ... Approximately 600 recordings are necessary to make a version of this piece.' "Williams Mix" existed almost exclusively as a visual trace: when Cage bravely attempted a version of the score, it took him about one year to compose a four-minute-long mix, working in collaboration with experimental composers Earle Brown and David Tudor.

Other electroacoustic composers experimented with tapes in France, Italy, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada. Norma Beecroft (1934 -2024), for instance, was hailed as 'the Canadian Delia Derbyshire'. And amongst the other female composers who were professionally involved in tape music (and were often working in film, radio and television) we can also cite Daphne Oram, Eliane Radigue (who collaborated with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer), Bebe Barron and Pauline Oliveros.

The serious, institutional musique concrète scene always had a lighter, more popular and decentred counterpart. Writers and composers like Fred Judd played a significant role in encouraging people to experiment with sound at home. In The Sound Makers, a 1963 BBC programme devoted to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Desmond Briscoe (then head of the RW) similarly invited amateur tape recordists to be bold and experimentally minded. The programme described how some of the sound effects for Giants of Steam (a soon-to-be broadcast BBC TV show) were made, with the hope that demystifying the process would help amateurs do similar things. RW technicians Dick Mills and Brian Hodgson (who had composed the sound effects for Giants of Steam together) were interviewed, underlining the time-consuming nature of creating new sounds with magnetic tape. For instance, it took them three days to complete some of the more complex loops used in the film, and nearly six weeks were spent on finalising the sound effects. Achieving original, "interesting" - or even "artistic" - results on tape required skills, money, creative imagination, time and patience - attributes which were unevenly distributed amongst amateurs. Yet they were willing to try - alone or in groups.


Tape Clubs and Tapesponding

Shortly after the first domestic tape-recorders were made commercially available, amateur tape clubs, circles and societies flourished across the world. In Britain, the first nation-wide tape group was the Amateur Tape Recording Society (founded in 1955), followed in January 1959 by the British Tape Recording Club (the former was incorporated by the latter in September of the same year). Within the first year of its existence, 5,500 members joined the British Tape Recording Club; the magazine Amateur Tape Recording was founded in August 1959 with a monthly print run self-reportedly rising from 25,000 copies (for its first issues) to 60,000 in early 1960. The magazine appealed to members of the British Tape Recording Club, as well as to those who had joined one of its numerous regional branches. By 1962, the UK alone counted almost 150 regional tape clubs across the country, with one quarter of the clubs having above 100 members. There were clubs in all major British cities, and in many smaller towns and rural areas too - including in Ipswich, Sheffield, Rugby, Warwick, Leamington, Derby, Walthamstow, Wakefield and Aberdeen.

In 2002, Scottish sound artist and phono-archaeologist Mark Vernon came across a batch of tapes produced by the Derby Tape Recording Club at a car-boot sale, a chance encounter which led to the progressive rediscovery of the club's archive - as well as that of the Leicester Tape Recording Club and of the Nottingham Co-operative Tape Recording Club. Some of the recordings made by the East Midlands tape clubs between 1959 and 1978 were subsequently edited and used by Vernon as raw material for his own sound collages. They were also commercially issued for the first time in 2013 on CDr - an underground medium of choice - by the Estonian label Framework Seasonal. The 2018 release of the compilation Danske Båndamatører/Danish Tape Amateurs, 1959-1976 (Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology, IDL05) is another example of how vernacular club recordings, never intended for wide public consumption, get recirculated and commercialised.

An activity that was widespread in tape clubs was 'tapesponding.' The practice of tapespondence - initially termed "wirespondence" - formally began in 1950 with the creation of two associations in the U.S. The earliest one, the Webster Wirespondence Club, was founded by John G. Schirmer, who worked for the tape manufacturer Webster-Chicago (Webcor) and imagined wirespondence as a means to increase the sale of wire-recorders (throughout the decade, the Webcor company would continue to promote its tape recorder as ideal for tapesponding). The second tapespondence association, operating on the West Coast, was Fred Goetz's Tape Respondents International. The transnational tapesponding movement further consolidated in 1952 with the creation of Harry Matthews's World Tape Pals (WTP) in Dallas. Matthews had first used tape to correspond with his young son. Four years after its inception, the club counted over 2,000 members from thirty-three countries, keeping in touch through the quarterly journal Tape Topics. At the turn of 1960s, the club had members in fifty-six countries, and there existed a dozen tapespondence clubs in the U.S. and Canada. We could also cite clubs outside North American such as The Australian Tape Recordists Association, Dansk Magnettone Klub (Denmark), Auckland Tape Recording Club (New Zealand), South African Tape Recording Club and Durban and District Recording Club (South Africa), or yet again Tonband/Tape Recorder Amateur Club (South-West Africa) - as well as the numerous British clubs mentioned above.


Tape Recording for Pleasure

The world of tape clubs and home-recording existed independently from experimental studios and from the ambitions of avant-garde composers. Amateurs and everyday experimental sound-makers didn't necessarily know what they were doing. Mostly they were involved in tape recording 'for pleasure' - as the title of a 1961 tape recording manual puts it.

On its cover, the book shows a generic young woman - a stereotype of 1950s femininity, with her short dark hair, glimmering red lips and brightly coloured blouse. The photograph of the (unknown) woman suggests a link between sensuality and magnetic recording - she has put her hands behind her tilted head in an attitude of blissful relaxation. She literally glows. The cover image establishes a tacit relation between bodily pleasure and the direct, tactile art of tape manipulation. What does tape recording for pleasure mean?

'Pleasure' constitutes an ambiguous concept of the puritanical 1950s. Pleasure, more often than not, is 'guilty.' It serves no other purpose than its own satisfaction. It is idle, unproductive - done for its own sake rather than for any lasting results. Pleasure is fugitive, slippery. It belongs to the moment only. It is, in a way, the exact contrary of recording and the logic of cultural preservation - or magnetic embalming - it anticipates. Listening for pleasure - the other side of recording for pleasure - brings to mind the light music programmes of the late 1940s and the easy listening music of the following decade (that was encapsulated in the 1990s in the lounge revival and was suddenly cool: see for instance the two compilations released to accompany the Incredibly Strange Music books, or the Mondo Exotica and other Bachelor Pad type compilations). Pleasure, here, belongs to the masculine sphere of private satisfactions.


East and West

Beyond its entertaining value, tape could have a more radical, openly political way. In New York, sound collector Tony Schwartz created his phonomontages of marginalised, diverse neighbourhoods of the city for the Folkways label. He carried his Magnamite recorder everywhere - a machine he described in the liner notes of his New York 19 LP (Fokways FP58, 1954) as 'a completely portable, lightweight tape recorder, which makes the world your recording studio and a little hand-held box your control room.'

Tony Schwartz's political engagement with tape had started early, in the late 1940s, with his 11-minute (unreleased) "Programme Against Fascism" (1949). The recording offered an early, rudimentary example of splicing. Schwartz's tape juxtaposed archival recordings of political figures (including Nazi leaders and Winston Churchill) with contemporary extracts of interviews with American generals and Harry Truman denouncing the threat of Communism. Schwartz's provocative juxtaposition aimed at linking a former regime of totalitarianism to the perceived fascism of postwar America through the manipulation of recordings from different sources in space and time.

Schwartz's social/tape work of the 1950s celebrated - as one critic put it - "the tape recorder's democratic potential for capturing a range of voices previously denied ready access to mechanical reproduction" (Shapcott 2002, 231).2 At the same time, Jack Kerouac wrote Visions of Cody (1951-1952), a novel based on taped conversations he had with his friends (Kerouac's engagement with tape as writing instrument anticipates William Burroughs' radical experiments of the 1960s and 1970s). Visions of Cody wove together previously unrecorded, marginalised voices included his own (French-Canadian) voice, that of Neal Cassady (his working class companion) and of Carolyn Cassady (as a new type of woman, emancipated and economically independent).

Released the year after New York 19, Schwartz's 1955 LP Exchange (Folkways FP62), was also a tapestry of tape. It wove together tens of thousands of snippets from recordings of vernacular songs he had received from 'tapespondents' from over forty countries in the world. The Exchange LP - which modestly sold 317 copies within the first four years of its release - was intended less as a finished consumer's product than as an invitation for listeners to (re)produce, perform and disseminate their personal magnetic microcosms: Schwartz considered the relational value of recording (its disseminative force) as inseparable from its aesthetics. He thought that tape could change the world - or, in the divided climate of the Cold War, overcome ideological tensions and inspire better understanding between people.

As well as exchanges between Western countries, there also existed a desire to reach potential tape enthusiasts living in Eastern Bloc countries. In 1959, for instance, Peter Starie - the secretary of a Leicester-based tapespondence club - entertained the dream of mailing tapes beyond the Iron Curtain. Though such fantasies were often left unfulfilled, some examples of inter-bloc exchanges were documented. In his memoirs, Hungarian radio broadcaster and music critic Bálint András Varga recalls the lasting formative and affective impact that tapespondence had on his life. In the first half of the 1960s, he was able to enrol as a student of English and Russian at Budapest University, and purchased a tape recorder in 1961, initially with the hope of practicing and improving his spoken English. The acquisition of the machine represented "the single most decisive event in [his] life" (Varga 2013, 293). Varga offers no precise description of the equipment he purchased, remembering his tape recorder as "an unwieldy monster" while "the tapes on sale were of shoddy quality with the magnetic layer likely to flake off" (Varga 2013, 293). Varga, however, eloquently recalls the friendships he formed when he became a member of the Australian Tapesponding Association in the early 1960s, soon exchanging tapes with people living beyond the Iron Curtain. He remarked that tapespondence "may or may not have been a long-lived hobby on an international scale but it has changed [his] life" (Varga 2013, 293).3


Women's Work

(Male) tape recordists had their share of fun. They gathered in clubs. They sat in garden sheds and garages and experimented. They struck up tape friendships over the world. They put together home movies and created their own sound effects for them (at a time when a strong connection existed between amateur filmmakers' groups and tape groups). The pleasures of open reel recording however were short-lived and most tape clubs (apart from the East Midlands ones) didn't outlive the 1960s. Bulky reel-to-reel recorders were rapidly forgotten, replaced by cassette tape recorders (with the first model introduced by Philipps in 1964) that were far easier to carry and to use, although they offered a frustratingly limited range of options for creatively minded amateurs (only the introduction of the Tascam four-track recorder or 'Portastudio,' in 1979, would restore the spirit of creativity and contribute to launching a wonderfully vibrant cassette underground).

I would like to come back to an image: the quietly ecstatic woman on the front cover of Tape Recording for Pleasure, disappearing in her private world of sounds. Despite what the book cover may deceptively suggest, women were not the main users of tape recorders - and they mostly accessed the realm of recording vicariously, through their boyfriends, husbands and brothers. And yet women played a central role in the industrial history of tape: it was they who meticulously manufactured electronic components, soldered tape machines together and applied magnetic coating to the tape.

Not very far from where I live, in the North East of England, the Ferrograph factory employed 220 women (out of a staff of 340) at the turn of the 1960s. Ferrograph, previously known as Wright & Weaire (it changed its name in 1958), initially produced electrical products such as transformers, switches and coils that would be used in manufacturing the countless brown goods of the postwar years. Later, the company specialised in tape decks. In the past few years, I have tried to gather information about Ferrograph from people who still remember it (it closed down in the second half of the 1970s). Their memories are hazy. Some of them remember popping down to the factory to buy tape recorders at the most advantageous price. They speak about how Ferrograph tape recorders, known for their robustness and precision - as well as relative portability - were fitted on submarines and ships (until the 1980s, those were also built on the North East coast of England). In Kent, Collaro Works also manufactured tape decks on a massive scale, employing a staggering 2000 persons in 1960. Magnetic coating was produced, and experimented with, at the M.S.S. factory in Buckinghamshire, a plant that had become internationally known in the early 1930s for its production of lacquer discs for direct recordings (it remained a very important manufacturer of blank media carriers after the war).

I find myself increasingly drawn to this other, industrial side of tape. And though it may take a long time, it is my hope to recover the histories of sites such as Ferrograph, Collaro Works and M.S.S. - as forgotten places where the long history of tape was put together. There is a bridge to be built between the consumers of brown goods and those who made them - not for pleasure but because it was their job. I cannot help seeing in these anonymous working women another node of the vast magnetic network. In my mind, these women constitute the other tape underground - or its best-kept secret.


Further Readings


Footnotes:

1 The book was first published by Sound on Sound in 2016, with a revised edition issued by Velocity Press in 2021.

2. Shapcott, John. 2002. "'I Didn't Punctuate It': Locating the Tape and Text of Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody and Doctor Sax in a Culture of Spontaneous Improvisation." Journal of American Studies 36 (2): 231-248.

3. Varga, Bálint A. 2013. From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.


Check out the rest of PERFECT SOUND FOREVER

MAIN PAGE ARTICLES STAFF/FAVORITE MUSIC LINKS E-MAIL