46140, Anyone remember doing this to tapes?
Posted by johnbook, Wed Jul-06-05 03:04 PM
I had a good friend in intermediate school, and he happened to be a Jehovah's Witness. When it was lunchtime, he would gather along with the other JW's, and they always isolated themselves. I got along with everyone, and anyway, he (Troy) was cool because he liked some of the songs I liked. Plus, we both had Commodore VIC 20's so we often traded games. My mom felt that the Pac-Man for Atari 2600 was too expensive, so I had to find friends who had it. At that stage there was already Super Pac-Man, but you like to go back to the roots every once in awhile.
Anyway, Troy one day tells me "at church, did you know that you can hear backward messages if you undo the cassette case, and flip the cassette in a certain way, then rewind it?" I'm thinking no, the only way I could hear backward messages was by turning the record backwards, which of course would fuck up the record player itself.
So he shows me. He undoes the cassette, and you have the two reels. Instead of the tape going down on each side, he would flip it so that the path of the tape would look like an "S". He then pressed rewind or FF. Essentially, the tape was flipped. He then put the tape back as you would normally have it, and you are hearing the portion underneath the tape. You normally can't play the back surface, but when you record, some of it still seeps through. If it was a thin tape, like a Chrome one, the audio would be better.
He pops the tape in and it's Iron Maiden, because you know, they're Satanic. I hear the backwards guitars and drums and it's Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven", the big backward masking song. He tells me that it says "here's to my sweet Satan/the one who'll lead the path/who makes me sad/whose power is Satan". I'm thinking wow, that's cool, but not because of the message, but because one could make it go backwards simply by flipping the tape.
A year later, after I moved from Honolulu to Washington State, "Darling Nikki" came out, so I made my dub and heard Prince's message.
Looking back, it was so lo-fi, but it was "slightly" better than moving a record backwards by hand, because a cassette was steady, while for the most part your own finger was not.
ME
http://www.john-book.com
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http://www.musicforamerica.org/node/82679
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