To continue a "Tyranny" and cassette week, up next is the Tyranny >For You< promo cassette issued by Epic records. The design of this promo mirrors the promo t-shirt and 12" promo albums, featuring the "Tyranny" symbols in black & white, and the US release date of January 29, 1991. I have invitations and other items that were given away at the listening/preview party, but I am unsure whether or not this cassette promo was given away at that time...perhaps someone could vouch for that?
The cassette has the Epic promo catalogue # AEC 46998. I do not see this offered for sale as often as the 12" vinyl (I will eventually post it); the vinyl sometimes goes between $25.00 - $50.00 range, but I would expect the cassette to be a bit cheaper?
Do you sometimes play the cassettes that you have ? I don't have a cassette player today, and my old cassettes suffer with humidity. It's a pity !
ReplyDeleteIt's very nice to see all this promo material! Stunning how much promotion Front 242 had in the nineties...
ReplyDeleteThe promotion they got from Epic was far more professional than that press flyer enclosed in the Two in One 12" you highlighted earlier :)
@Charles:
I actually do have a few Front 242 cassettes, but I play them only very rarely. The audio quality isn't really that good if you are used to the CD versions of the songs. The sound is flat and it lacks oomph. But of course, that depends on the previous owner & how much he or she has played them...
I think the audio quality also depends on the kind of tapes the record label used, though I'm not entirely sure. For example, I have a Czechoslovakian release of Front by Front, and it wouldn't surprise me if the quality of the tape is not as good as the RRE or WaxTrax versions, judging by the somewhat sloppy artwork of the release alone :) I do not however have the other cassette releases, so I am unable to compare. Perhaps someone else can?
IMHO, my conclusion is that cassettes are only good for collector's sake & fetishists :)
I love these comments. What may be sad, and of course telling my age, is how I bought everything in vinyl...then cassettes became popular and I would tape the vinyl onto homemade cassettes and xerox artwork...then I finally broke down and "invested" in cassettes, replacing my vinyl...only to have the entire process repeated when CDs came out! Mixed By Fear "forced" me to buy a CD player (which were expensive at the time)...there were no import cassette singles to find in the US at the time and no vinyl to be had...if I wanted it, I had to get it on CD..."242: Always Ahead!"
ReplyDeleteOh that is just too bad. So you had to collect everything three times? That sucks. My parents bought their first CD player back in 1988 (?) I think, so I missed out on the cassette era completely.
ReplyDeleteWhen I got a few Front 242 cassettes recently (you don't see them very often), I was rather unimpressed by the audio quality, to be honest. Especially with Front 242, where there is so much going on, you, as a listener, miss out on a lot of details. I think digital media justify the music of Front 242 much more than analog.
I think it was Douglas Adams who said that listeners of the 'analog age' didn't really care about or noticed the lacking audio quality and the raw sound of their records and cassettes. It was only with the coming of digital music (i.e. CDs) people really began to notice the differences, and quickly became used to the new improvement in sound, and would never look back to their analogue records. I think he has made a very sensible point there. At least, I have the same feeling about that.
I know, I am a bit spoilt, but I really do enjoy CDs much more than records and cassettes. The latter I collect just more for a form of curiosity.