The Cassette in the Cupboard
When I first moved into my apartment here in Minneapolis, I was overwhelmed with the task of where to store the abundance of miscellany I’ve acquired over the years. My apartment is by no means a hole in the wall, but the building is one hundred years old and the archaic floor plan of my place isn’t exactly tailored to the excess of modern living.
I made the decision at one point to stuff some pretty unwieldy vocal booth foam in this awkward little cabinet inside the walk-in closet in my room. It was a poor choice, mostly because of how difficult it was when I attempted to retrieve it a few months later. I had to plant my feet firmly on the floor and use my entire body to try to extract this thing like I was trying to pull Excalibur out of god damn stone.
In probably one of the more cinematic moments of my life, I pulled hard enough to dislodge it, sending me falling backward. But when I stood up, I noticed there was a cassette tape on the floor, which I imagine was hiding inside the cupboard and somehow managed to avoid detection. It was a Never Ending Story moment.
My car has a cassette player (I keeps it vintage, yall) and I quickly ran down to the parking lot to pop this thing in and find out what was on it. It was far, far better than I could have expected.
The contents turned out to be a girl’s dream diary–presumably by the woman who lived here prior to me–and documented about a half a year’s worth of dreams she had. Listening to her felt strangely voyeuristic and at times uncomfortable. The dreams ranged from silly things like teaching kids how to swim and avoid sharks to creepy fragments of her past that slipped into her head in the middle of the night and made her wake up in tears. As far as I can tell, she recorded these every day only moments after waking up.
It was weird to try to stitch together information about her from the pieces she let slip from time to time. It seems she was in her twenties when she recorded this, wore dreadlocks, was in love with a straight female friend of hers and was plagued occasionally with sexual thoughts about her male dentist that made her question her status as a lesbian. Also, it seems that she was keeping this diary on the request of a fringe religion based out of Minnesota called Eckism, who believe that light, sound and dreams are communication with God.
Naturally, I’ll be including little bits and pieces of this recording on my upcoming record “The Everafter LP”.
Maybe I’ll upload some clips from time to time on here as well. I just wanted to provide a little background.