CASSETTE MIXTAPE
On 1st August 2017 I recovered a cassette tape washed up from the North Atlantic Ocean, floating on the shoreline of Playa de Barlovento de Jandía, Lanzarote. I photographed the tape where I found it and took it home to dry out. Doubting whether it would play, I forgot about it, leaving it on my window sill for more than a year before deciding to send it to an audio specialist to see if any sound could be recovered.
A professional audio restorer ran the tape through cleaning heads several times. The beginning and ending tracks on the tape played badly at first, with the middle almost perfect due to the tape being stuck together in a sealed mass. Cleaning resulted in near perfect recordings that could clearly be identified as twenty tracks from the 1990’s. Incredible to think that music preserved on plastic had survived its journey in the sea. I chose to include it in my upcoming solo exhibition ‘Sea of Artifacts’ at Fotografiska in Stockholm, alongside 47 of my featured works, as another way and platform to engage the audience with the marine plastic issue.
The tape was exhibited in a vitrine along with the recovered 20 track audio, via headphones for the viewer to listen to the songs that had spent time under the sea…
On 3rd August 2019 I received an email from Stella, a member of the public from Berlin who had visited my exhibition a few days earlier saying that she had seen the mixtape in my exhibition and said,
“when I was reading the track list it seemed very familiar to me... because of the arrangement of the songs, so I made a picture of it and compared it with the Original CD from 1993 I still have, and it was exactly the same tracklist! - starting with track 3. I remember that I didn’t like the first two songs on the CD because I felt they were too old. So I wouldn’t have include them when I recorded the mixtape aged 12. I also have an association with the Jungle Book song that this was always the third track.”
“I always made tapes from my CDs in this time to listen to them with my Walkman, especially for holidays, and to think that a tape I could have lost more then 20 years ago had been found is incredible. So it might be possible that this was my tape! What a coincidence! I just wanted to let you know”.
After receiving Stella’s email I was dumbfounded. I checked again with the restorer in case the cassette could perhaps be missing the first couple of songs because the tape had been pulled out. But the restorer assured me that what he recovered was the beginning of the tape and there was nothing missing before that. I relayed the story to Professor Richard Thompson OBE, Head of the International Marine Litter Research Unit at the University of Plymouth, and he said;
“This is an amazing story and another example of the problem of plastic pollution. It is very difficult to say exactly how long the tape has been in the sea, but the fact it has survived intact shows the durability of plastic and the threat it can pose to the marine environment.”
It is never really ever possible to know the journey of where marine plastic originated, how it got into the sea, and where it is eventually washed up. But the fact that Stella recorded a mixtape unique to her and probably lost it in Spain, is a story worth telling.
When you listen to this mixtape I would like you to imagine the possibility that this music could have been submerged for 25 years.
The cassette mixtape is currently on tour with the exhibition ‘Sea of Artifacts’ at Fotografiska - another story and message about plastic pollution, which through media platforms has now reached audiences far and wide.
