The Wire Tape Club

Four cassettes a year, dubbed one at a time on a bank of six decks at Ferric Audio. Real time means real time: a C60 takes an hour to make, six at once, four hundred copies a quarter. That arithmetic is why the tapes ship a fortnight later than we would like, and why we have stopped promising a date. It is also why they sound the way they do, because somebody is sitting there listening to every one go past.

What is on them

Side A is new music: six or seven tracks, commissioned or licensed, artists paid a flat fee and keeping everything else. Side B comes out of the archive, or out of the ground: an unreleased session, a mix that never went up, or thirty minutes pulled from the Field Recording Atlas and sequenced into something you can fall asleep to.

Type II chrome tape, Dolby off, levels pushed a little further than is sensible. The J-card is risograph-printed in two colours and hand-numbered, and there is a download code inside for the days when the deck is in the loft.

How to join

Sixty dollars a year for four tapes, shipping included to most countries, or forty-eight if you are on Studio Pass. Single tapes are eighteen dollars while they last, and nothing gets repressed. Join before the first of March, June, September or December to catch that quarter's dub; after that you start with the next one and can buy back one issue.

Artists: two tracks and a sentence, not a link tree. Side B suggestions are welcome from anyone. And if you do not own a cassette deck, we are not going to be the ones who talk you out of buying one, though Wire Radio will play the whole tape the week it ships if you would rather wait and see.