TAPE #1 by Blinding Headache, Information and Mofungo, etc.

Tape #1 was self-released on cassette in 1980 by the then current and recently former members of the bands Mofungo, Information and Blinding Headache. At the time, they seemed incapable of imagining doing the work required to make this a vinyl release - and CDs and digital distribution were the stuff of science fiction...

tracks 1 -21 appeared on the "Side With Dot" (a blue circular sticker)
tracks 22 - 43 are from the "Side Without Dot"

THOUGHTS ON TAPE #1
Tim Holmes, New York City, February 2009

Hearing Tape #1 again after lo! so many intervening epochs feels like stepping into that once-and-soon-returning New York City of blown-out abandoned squat-filled tenement buildings, tramps and squeegee men huddled round sidewalk campfires blazing in open trash-cans, the sound- system of Club Chandelier crackling with the electricity illegally jacked and boosted through extension cords running into the amps of the bands from the street-light poles of Avenue C.

30-odd years ago, at the post-punk-pre-alt-rock cusp of what-the-fuck-are- we-supposed-to-do-now?, back in 1979-80 when the music of Tape #1 was conceived and recorded, Phil Dray and Chris Nelson -- a pair of ex- pats from my own hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, pals of mine who'd successfully migrated eastward -- were living the dream in Gotham on the Hudson. They'd launched a 'zine, called "New Order" at first until it became known simply by its initials "N.O." (at least as influential a herald to a movement as house organ "Punk" had been to a prior youth coup) and formed a band with drummer Rick Brown called "Information," a moniker both pre-cursive (intimating the rapidly- impending, yet still-nascent technocracy) and post-modern (a morally neutral recombinant deadpan systems analysis).

Issue #4 of N.O. magazine consisted of an Information flexi-disc, some smaller fanzines and surprise whatnots crammed into a 9x12 manila envelope. Each individual copy contained its own particularized cornucopia of New York treasures and detritus. Mine held a lengthy xeroxed tribute to Donovan, some green window-pane and flimsy piece of black plastic containing the Information manifesto "New Alphabet," which presaged Tape #1 with nothing less than the promise to re-imagine all art and culture, beginning with the most basic of building blocks: the phonemes we call letters.

With Tape #1 's "Let's Compromise," the band Information literally negates nihilism, proffering an aesthetic détente so elegant that it dissolves the energy v. musicality debate at the core of punk's rigidly doctrinaire rejection of the status quo.

Mulling over Tape #1 's 43 exquisitely constructed soundscapes -- the longest running at 3 minutes, many of them under 60 seconds -- one senses the absolute freedom generated by a zeitgeist unleashed from the ulterior: the majestic curtains of billowing consonant roar tucked into the folds of Blinding Headache's "Total Media Blackout," Mofungo's angular tributes to John Lee Hooker ("Boom Boom") and Rodgers & Hammerstein ("Bali Hai"), the plaintive melodies of Information's "Little Pony," Mofungo's "Song from Sierra Leone" and Blinding Headache's "Vowel Glue."

What strikes me 30 years on is how guileless and direct and complicated and intelligent and downright musical Tape #1 really is. Hearing it again makes me feel like an archeologist uncovering the remnants of a civilization intensely alien, intensely familiar and intensely useful.

The spirit of Tape #1 is part of the reason I wanted to move to New York. When I finally moved here in 1984, I brought it with me. Today, somewhere in my railroad tenement apartment, I still have that original copy of Tape #1, piled under hundreds of other cassettes in a dusty cardboard carton, but, thanks to the global technology foreshadowed by these bands, I can listen to Tape #1 on my 21st century iPhone as I go about my business on the streets of Manhattan.

Rick Brown is the plywood crate guy in 75 Dollar Bill. He's been in bands before...

Fish & Roses
V-Effect
Les Batteries
Timber
Run On
Blinding Headache
Information
Red, Dark, Sweet
Rattle (not the UK one)
Love Layers

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