How to Make a Cassette Mixtape

HOW TO MAKE A CASSETTE MIXTAPE

What you need

One blank cassette tape

One cassette recorder

Sounds

Optional: tools for splicing. E.g. splicing block, splicing tape, craft knife, tweezers, a pen or pencil

Step 1: Press "Record"

Press Record.

JUST HIT THAT FRIGGIN BUTTON FOR CHRIST'S SAKE

Doesn't matter if you have no idea what gets in there. Hesitating when to start gets you nowhere. It's not as if you're going to be satisfied about either Take 1 or Take 101. There will always be things that distort what you want to record like breathing or static or unwanted sounds. Just let that slide. Otherwise you'll never produce anything.

And do make sure the cassette tape is actually in the recorder as you record.

Step 2: Arrange the Tracks

You're probably going to sample a lot of songs because you consider them quite intrinsic to your identity. Some ones with great lyrics, others with great composition that connects with you in a spiritual sense. Songs like these create unforgettable imageries that become inseparable from the songs and memories associated with them and become a part of the space-time complex you have left backward on the axis of time. A portal through which you could revisit the past anytime you'd like. Remember to fit them inside the time limit.

Step 3: Collect Voices

The unique nature of mixtapes that differentiates them from modern playlists is that you can always record bits of the outside world together with the songs. It's a good idea to sample some voices too because some people you have met in your life have left a strong impression impact on you. Record some voices with an external device, such as with an iPod, and play them on repeat while playing instruments or beats to create a remix.

Voices could be phrases, arguments, jokes. Could be emotionally charged, rhythmically interesting, or personally meaningful.

Remember to revisit and include the favorite fragments of your past dialogues. Like the one from 2024 with Gatsby in it by the seaside where you cried, and the most recent one on Shakespeare Day about making a pilgrimage to New York City and Berlin someday. They are things you turn over in your head a bit too much over the years though you rarely speak about them, but if you splice only fragments of them on Side A, only you will understand what they mean.

Step 4: Trim or Splice when necessary

This is the time when you get creative about your samples. Cut the tape into fragments vertically or at a 45 degree angle for smoother seamless edits, and piece them back to your liking on the splicing tape, then trim the slicing tape and rewind the cassette.

At earlier stages most of these samples are still going to be long unbroken segments. Later on as your remixing skills have matured, they will become much more fragmented and mixed with some original stuff. That's a good thing. You should start to worry if 40 years have passed and the cassette recording still sounds like a standard Spotify playlist.

Step 5: Record over earlier versions

You will probably regret sampling some specific sounds or tracks. Good for you! (Or perhaps bad, I don't know. Nobody knows.) Don't worry though, just overwrite them by rerecording these parts, but if you listen close enough, old tracks may bleed through. It's unavoidable, unfortunately.

Step 6: Side A vs Side B

Ideally, Side A is constructed for public listening and Side B is reserved for internal use only. Try to show more sophistication and cultural literacy in Side A. Please keep in mind that side B is not meant to be widely distributed.

Step 7: Let someone else have it

If someone asks to borrow the mixtape, go ahead and lend them. Decide whether you would tell them Side B is broken and put tape over it upon the specific person.

Allow them to inherit fragments from it. If they decide to sample you and imitate you, let them be.

Troubleshooting

"Hey, I listened to this cassette recording and what is all this supposed to mean, you wrote only your name on it?"

Don't answer this question. Either they get it or they don't.

"This doesn't feel like you."

Of course it doesn't. From a postmodernist perspective everything is perception and nothing is reality.

"Can I sample this cassette recording?"

Feel free. Send this cassette back when you're done and let me have a listen of what you recorded.

Storage Instructions

Magnetic material is vulnerable to inappropriate exposure.

Maximum playing time must not exceed half the total time of the cassette tape for safety reasons.

A Plate of River Snails

A plate of river snails are set on the revolving disk where they pass food round the roundtable. They say river snails are the specialty of Jiangxi province. Maybe only people as pretentious as the French eat snails, but who knows. My hands extended toward the plate and grabbed one before I knew it--oh. There goes my table etiquettes for the night.

I'm sorry. Don't nitpick me or anything, I'm not in the mood.

Cut to the snail in between my fingers. Hard boiled, brown-shelled, mean, ruthless and invasive with the tang of garlic and chili pepper. No longer than a digit of my index finger. I genuinely wonder who first--out of the entire river ecosystem--chose to excavate it from the riverbed sludge, held this puny pathetic existence between their fingers, and concluded that yes, of course, it belongs firmly to the human mouth. The way how Chinese people approach the edible realm is indeed truly fascinating.

Two men sit in front of us. Beardy. Beardy took a swig of his bottled green tea and stared down into his plate. Shades. Shades wouldn't stop moving his lips, but Shades wouldn't eat. Shades just out flat yapped and bragged the bullshit out of himself like all men do at county roundtables. Except Shades had the damned audacity to do it without a single drop of alcohol. Hell, what a man.

I heard from someone at the table that you're supposed to eat river snails with a toothpick. Hard to imagine where to set the toothpick when the exterior is thoroughly covered in hardness--but sure. I turned the snail in every direction to inspect a possible entry point, and I found two. One at the top of the spiral, one at the end of the spiral, where a small cap-like flake clogs your way into the shell. I poked at the flake at the bottom with no avail, so I turned the snail over and poked the pick into the eye of the spiral where tiny beige-gray shreds of fiber showed and prodded around. Clearly these fiber are the edible parts of the corpse. I stabbed the fiber entirely into the shell, though. I couldn't yank it out. This must be a dead end.

When nothing peaceful works, remember: violence is clearly the way out. I turned back to the bottom of the snail again and gnashed my front teeth against the shell in a fit of calm, calculated rage. It clattered firmly against my braces and I knew something disastrous will happen to it, but nothing did. The shell broke by a margin, and I took it out of my teeth and promptly poked into the shell with a pick.

There. I did it. I was able to extract a half of the carcass out of the shell. It lay on my pick the way how soldier heads are chopped off and stuck on the sharp end of the spear at the end of a victorious battle and was devoured by my starving mouth. Tangy, salty, with a tad bit of spice. Soaked in those murky soups that float around cut-up cattle stomachs and squid tentacles like moats.

I looked up to tell Mom and J that hey, look, I figured out how to eat those river snails. I've just eaten my first river snail, how about that.

Cut to Shades's blabbering sausage mouth coated in glittering glistening spit. I coach drivers, Shades says. My instructor trains political big shots, armed police leadership, the whole lot. That’s just his circle. I take my momma on my Harley across provinces back to Shanghai and nobody would stop me on the highway 'cause hah, the lot knew me. Ain't none of 'em fuck with me. You'd never get the protection you get in the States from me like on your way to the restaurant. I rode my Harley next to you as you walked block after block. That's some first-tier escort, no?

The women raised their glasses to that. Neither bothered to even shoot a look at me. But something's in the air, I could smell it. Something vaguely like the rotting filth when Beardy reached up the wall from a wobbly chair to peel off the silicon rubbing on inscriptions earlier today, asked Shades to hold his waist to keep him from falling off and Shades grabbed him firmly by the ass. Whatever that is meant to suggest, that sight is fucking unsolicited.

I lowered my head and took a second snail from the plate. Something clicked in me that I should start dissecting it from the bottom, and I did. I pricked again at the cap-like flake at the bottom, but instead of pushing it down, I levered it up--voila. A flat grey-black head peered from under the cap. Stab, twist, yank. Out comes a long twisted strand of snail carcass as I stared in profound awe. The sweetness of satisfaction is frolicking on the tip of my tongue. Yes, I think I've just correctly dissected my first river snail, and in less than a second it will make its grand entrance to my starving mouth--

Except that the sound was a clean chomp like crushed grit which clearly doesn't sound right and sent chills down my spine. I took the carcass out of my mouth and spat out the rocky remnants onto the napkin.

Shells.

There were more shells in the snail. Even tinier ones, a whole cluster of them. Not even broken shell from the outside or gravel or dirt.

There were babies in there.

I stared at the evidence. The evidence stared back. Well, not literally--thank God--but there they were. Tiny translucent or opaque spirals no bigger than sesame seeds, packed inside the larger snail like somebody had hidden an entire kindergarten in there. Nobody informed me I was expected to participate in infanticide tonight. I mean--granted, these kids are dead anyways before I excavated them, but chewing through the carcasses of these kids when you clearly only expected adult ones from the dish is a whole new level of cursedness.

I was carefully squeezing the pieces of children out with my fingers when Shades called me out across the table and said I was eating it wrong. He said I should watch him put it in the mouth and suck it out. He scooped up five snails in a spoon, popped them in his mouth, and spat them out one by one. As though I could learn that mastery entirely from watching his facial movements.

Does the fact that the gritty sandy chomping noises of the unborn children with shells not make him want to spit them out, or at least remove them from the carcass before consuming it, I asked?

Shades stared at the napkin. Then at me. Then back at the napkin. Just eat it, he says. You don't have to be that picky to your food.

I deadpanned him in the eyes until he looked away and shrugged. Hey, at least I was following the procedure of a person who wished to know exactly what entered her digestive tract. Easy for him to say it was too much work. The man had spent the last hour explaining their place in the organizational structure of the Chinese transportation industry to three women who never asked. Clearly we had very different definitions of unnecessary labor.

I finished half a plate of all these snails by the end of the dinner. Mom and J walked out promptly with me and J was asking Mom how she could cope with these dinner events where, in her industry, most of the participants were male and uncomfortable situations like this emerge way too often.

For most of dinner I worried this meant I was bad at being and not even learning to be an adult. J knew how to smile through it, Mom knew how to redirect it, but I just disappeared into a plate of river snails because there Mom and J were there for me to do the talking. When Shades launched into another story, they knew how to nod at the right moments and keep the conversation moving.

I knew how to dissect a river snail.

The embarrassing thing is that I wasn't even trying. A man could talk for an hour about who he knew, who owed him favors, who would stop their car for him on a highway, and everyone else would nod along as though those stories were the thing itself. Usually I pretend better than this and make an effort to look interested. But for once there were adults in the room whose job it was to handle the social weather. I could let my attention drift wherever it naturally wanted to go, and apparently it wanted to go toward a plate of snails.

Maybe that says something unflattering about me. Or maybe it says something about how much of growing up is performance. Everyone else knew how to participate in the conversation whether or not they cared about it. I hadn't learned that skill yet, or maybe I just wasn't using it. The snails had considerably less to say, which, frankly, made them far more pleasant company.