I put a cassette player in my bathroom wall
I’ve always been intrigued by hidden compartments. I long saw them as out of reach, too expensive, yada.
And then for some reason I started becoming obsessed with tapes.
I’m a milenial who has dabbled in the magenetic arts, but mostly as a kid.
A friend had a small, simple tape player in her bathroom, and i got inspired to have something similar. A place dedicated to intentional analog listening. Nothing fancy, didn’t need to be hifi, just tactile. A place that forces you to make a choice and live with it.
I blocked out a weekend and knocked it out.
There’s a hole in my wall now.
The speakers are basic drivers designed to be mounted in a wall. They use the wall cavity as the baffle - if the speakers are just in open air, it’s silmilar to riding a bike on an ice rink, you’re not going far. But in the wall, they use the wall as sort of a big speaker box - the air is contained behind the speaker so it gives power to the driver.
I looked for months for the perfect tape machine. it had to be:
-vertically oriented
-shallow enough to fit inside the wall
-look cool
Unfortunately I couldn’t find one with auto-reverse. They didn’t have that tech in the 70’s yet, and I definitely prefer the silver faces of machines of that era. There really aren’t too many vertical tape machine models ever made, so I couldn’t be picky with features. Plus I kinda don’t mind switching the cassette side, it’s old school and part of the ritual.
I bought like 9 tapes from local LA label Leaving Records. They definitely came through with a nice set of ambient and ethereal music that’s great for making my own spa.
Among other adventures, dyring the install I had the thrill of realizing I had accidentally drilled into a drain pipe. Luckily it was just the air vent for the toilet drain, but wow I was in sheer terror for a hot minute there.
I hope this inspires you as Tatev inspired me.
Made visuals for a Sego vid
Old pal Spencer Petersen reached out to me to collaborate on a music video for Sego.
Since leaving the business of music, my inner north star has always led me to decolonize music, to make it more communal, more open to everyone. So for this project, my intention was to set up a glitch machine and turn the band loose on it. Of course while the band was performing, I had to be piloting the glitch ship myself, but I gave the band time to do their own experimentation.
It was a fun shoot. Shoutout to the man Dano Sripuntanagoon for help with lighting, and Marl Superstar for helping hands and vibes.
God damn, TVs are a TON of weight.
It’s hard to describe the magic of seeing those images in person. I tried my best to capture what is feels like. Online it definitely loses a lot - let’s face it, CRT imagery has made its way into the roar of digital visual noise at this point. It’s not inherently new. But in person it certainly is something else.
The technology is fascinating to learn about. It’s almost unfathomable to me that people in the 1920’s figured out how to use essentially an electron gun to recreate images - basically by using very high frequencies to force the gun to scan screen lines several times per second. This was before any kind of digital anything was around. It’s an incredibly high amount of information being captured and transmited. It is nothing short of magic honestly. And there’s a certain quality the screens have - there’s phosphorus inside, and it has a glowing quality. It’s sort of hypnotizing. Our phone and tv screens now are so much more clean and perfect. But old crt TVs look electric.
Those of us who grew up in the 2000s or before remember this look. I don’t remember clocking those qualities of it then though. It was sort of all we had, so I remember being amazed when something looked extra crisp on TV. My family’s 27” JVC tv was super clean and the image was clear. I’m sure if we watched something on it today we would see it as soft and low res.
It’s also interesting to me that we have long since tooled down from the manufacturing infrasctructure that made these televisions. So the TVs that exist today, that’s it - there will be no more built. It’s a fading technology, so it’s naturally a scarce experience.
Segosucks.com
Friends dream of Sloppi
As the one year anniversary of our dear friend Cory’s death last year was approaching, I was longing for a way to honor him, to keep his memory alive, and to just gather with people that knew him.
I had been given a few of his old DJ sets as audio files, and noticed one of them was titled Sloppi Dreams of Friends.mp3. It was a mix he made just for a few of his friends. He lived pretty intentionally like that, he let you know he cared in a milion ways.
I bought a couple turntables cheap on fb marketplace, along with a dj coffin, packed a crate full of records, and set out for a park vinyl hang. I invited anyone who wanted to come along, and to spin records too.
My recorder ran out halfway through the afternoon, so a few djs are not present on this recording. But we did get three hours.
Me
Not Paul
Sweetbobbysean
Enjoy
Records and grief
I’m selling hundreds of records. I’m selling them because I overbought. I overbought because I’m trying to collect records the way my friend Cory did when he was alive. Trying to hold onto the magic that he breathed into our lives through vinyl records, the time capsules they are.
Well I’m not half the collector he was, and over a weekend, all of a sudden I had ten crates and tubs of vinyl records in my living room, an overwhelming project I had given myself to sort through someone else’s collection in hopes of finding hidden gems.
And while I’m sorting, I’m hitting a bunch of rock records, most of which I don’t want to keep, but then I see Squeeze, and Spiro-Gyro, and I immediately think of my dad, he would love those. And I realize this is something we would have been able to connect on, two students of music appreciating that someone had created this somehow. I broke down immediately.
Grief is so daunting sometimes. I want to think I’m really brave, and I’m not like everyone else who runs from it. I want to think I’m good at grief. But the last few years have shown me if anything I’m just like everyone else, I hate the thought of it, I don’t want to have to feel it, I’m scared of how big it’ll be, how long it will take, and I come up with all sorts of things to run from it.
I look out my window sometimes, I have a vew of my neighborhood. Are we all just pidgeons running around looking for need fulfilment, usually blind that we’re not doing it the best way? Hungry ghosts?
I’ve learned you have to talk yourself through your grief sometimes. I have to remind myself it’s not endless, that it actually will feel good to get it out, that people are there for me if i need them.
Here’s the facebook marketplace listing if you wanna buy my old records
My fire
Have you ever been involved in a fire scare? I do not wish it on you.Just remembering it seems to make the cortisol in my body on alert.
I grew up in a non-emergency household. I’m sure it’s not uncommon to be not having fire extinguishers, etc. No one is prepared enough. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a lived sense - likely from boomers overcompensating for the terrors their parents guarded against - that nothing bad would ever happen to us.
It’s good for kids to feel physically safe. But that’s a lot different than nothing bad will ever happen. I complained about this numerous times growing up to my parents - that nothing bad ever happens to us. Not that I wanted bad things to happen, just that something seemed off about it. Though in retrospect it might have done us some good to have two-tree moderately bad things happen to us. Maybe not cancer, but say a lengthy illness. Or maybe a parent lost a job. We got squat!
I think I’ve carried this subtle obliviousness to danger with me in my life, and it’s been a useful although unhealthy sheild to carry. Useful because it saved me a ton of stress, and because anxiety can be taken to such an extreme that it becomes self-sabatoge. But unhealthy because it made me too foolhardy, probably too reckless at times - which is also self-sabatoge.
It is within this subtle oblivion that I found myself cutting steel square tube with my compound miter saw in the skinny workshop behind my house. I had done it a bunch before, recently. I wore the denim long welding gloves that protect my forearms from hot metal embers.
All of a sudden I saw light coming from behind my worktable. FUCK, a flame that looked like it had been burning for a half a minute, probably knee height, singeing the house wall. I grabbed the closest useful thing which was a cardboard box, and tried stomping it out with that. It stopped for a minute, but restarted again, fuck! I stomped it out again more ferociously. Waited a while, scared. It started again! I wrestled the cart away so I could get in there better, grabbed a bigger piece of cardboard and snuffed it. When it was out, I rage emptied my shop trash, went to the kitchen to fill with water, and came back and flooded the area.
There’s nothing quite like awareness shifting from litteraly putting out fires to oh wow, my shop looks like a tornado hit it. And then the grattitude
The deep breathing
And revolving between:
Feartripping about if it had been bigger, what if an ember had gone up the vacuum system to light the whole basin of sawdust
And letting it sink in that I, indeed, am a very, very, uncautious person, and that I’m surprised more bad things have not happened to me in my life.
I’m glad my bad accident scare was this tame honestly. It didn’t feel tame at the time, but there are fare worse come to jesus moments one could have with this stuff. I have a bud who lost a finger in a saw. I feel lucky that I was humbled and I’m still all here.
For anyone having motherly worry towards me, I now have a fire extinguisher back there, and I follow different, safer protocol for anything that will produce sparks.
Just glad to be alive, grateful for life, and the weird way time inevitably shows you your idiosyncrasies.