The Return of Tape: Ferric's 'Oxide Dreams' Reviewed

Ferric Audio started coating tape in 1981, in a unit behind a paint works, on a machine built for something else. It sold reels to radio stations and duplication houses for two decades, lost the last of that work to CD-R in 2002, and shut down the following year. The coating line went into a storage unit and stayed there until 2019, when two former employees, Halla Ostberg and Wim Renner, bought it back for less than the price of a used van and spent three years relearning how to make it behave.

That is the history behind 'Oxide Dreams', which is an album made by a tape factory. Ostberg, Renner and two of their engineers wrote and recorded eight tracks entirely on a cassette four-track running Ferric's own C-60 stock at 3.75 inches per second. It is, transparently, an advertisement. It is also a better argument about tape than most of the records that get praised for using it, because it accidentally proves both halves of the case.

What the tape is actually doing

Some of what you hear is real and measurable. The machine has a low-frequency lift somewhere around 70 Hz, the head bump every cheap cassette deck has, and the bass on 'Slitter' sits in it like it was written there. Transients get shaved: the snare on 'Night Shift' was hit hard enough to be a problem on any digital front end, and instead of clipping it simply refuses to get louder, which is compression nobody had to dial in.

Then there is the pitch. At 1:58 in 'Coater' the left channel drops out for about a quarter of a second and comes back a fraction flat, a genuine tape fault they chose to keep, and the wobble underneath the whole song is the transport rather than any effect. Play the album next to a clean digital mix of the same material, which Ferric usefully put on their site, and the tape version is narrower, softer at the top, and noticeably easier to listen to for forty minutes. That is not nostalgia. That is the top end being politely removed before it can tire you out.

What the tape is covering up

Here is the other half. Hiss is a texture, and a texture reads as intimacy whether or not anything intimate is happening. Three of these eight tracks are sketches. 'Bias' is two chords and a mood, and on a clean recording it would be obviously two chords and a mood. Wrapped in a floor of noise and a gently seasick pitch, it sounds like a document of something. It is not a document of anything. It is a demo with an alibi.

This is the trap tape sets for people who love it, and the reason gear arguments get so bad-tempered. A process that flatters everything cannot be used as evidence that anything is good. Wow and flutter make an average vocal sound haunted. Saturation makes a thin arrangement sound decided. If you are choosing tape because your mixes feel sterile, you are usually treating the symptom.

The four-track was the instrument, not the tape

The best tracks here are not the ones that sound most like tape, they are the ones shaped by the machine's limits. Four tracks means bouncing, and bouncing means committing: once three parts are mixed down to one, that balance is permanent. On 'Second Generation' you can hear the first bounce's hiss sitting underneath the second, and you can also hear the consequence, which is a band that had to decide what the song was before the vocal went on.

Commitment is the thing being sold here, not oxide. That is the same argument I made about buying the cheap synth first: a limit you cannot argue with does more for a record than an option you can. The four-track just happens to enforce it more brutally than most, and it costs 90 to 220 dollars used, which is less than a month of most plugin subscriptions.

What this costs if you want to try it

Ferric's C-60 is around 9 dollars, their quarter-inch reel stock about 42, and both are genuinely good. A serviced four-track will run you 150 or so once you include a belt kit and someone competent to fit it. Budget for the head cleaning you will not do and the alignment you will get wrong.

Set against that, 'Oxide Dreams' is a persuasive object and an uneven record. Five real songs, three that lean on the medium, and a house band whose day job is clearly making tape rather than making albums. The same argument is running one shelf down, cheaper and with far less romance, among the people going back to minidisc, and it is worth watching, because it strips out the mythology and leaves only the practical question. Tape is a sound. It is also an alibi. This record is honest enough to be caught using it as both, sometimes in the same three minutes, and we will be dubbing something rather like it, one copy at a time, for the tape club.