Redlining The Hot/Crazy Matrix

The Riot Grrrl Modern Rock Mix

We found a cassette in the studio. The label was mostly gone.

This was early — before the theater, before most of the songs. We’d booked a few hours at a small independent studio, the kind of place that still had cassette decks and didn’t ask questions. We were there to record demos. We weren’t there to find anything.

All that was left on the label:

June 11, 1994 Redlining The Hot/Crazy Matrix (Riot Grrrl Modern Rock Mix)

We played it.

There were two songs on it. The first was older — disco, probably mid-70s, no attribution. The second was this one — a Riot Grrrl cover of the first, recorded by whoever left the tape behind and apparently never released. We don’t know the band. We don’t know the story. Just the date and the title and what’s on the tape.

The tape wasn’t in great shape. Thirty years in a studio drawer will do that. The music was still there but it was going — the kind of degradation that doesn’t stop. Another few years and it might not have been playable at all.

Before we did anything else we made copies — two digital transfers, and then one onto a fresh cassette, trying to keep as much of the original analog feel as possible. The degradation is still there. It’s part of what’s on the tape. But now there are copies, and the copies aren’t going anywhere.

The song knows what it’s doing. Sweetness and demolition in the same breath, sometimes the same word. Whoever recorded it understood something about the distance between those two things — which is to say, there isn’t any. And never was.

We could have just kept the tape. Or tossed it in the trash. Instead we learned it. Partly because we liked it. Partly because it felt like something that deserved to be finished properly — to exist in a form that wouldn’t keep degrading. We wanted to know what it felt like to be that band on that day. We didn’t find out. But we recorded it anyway, and that felt like the closest we were going to get.

It still sounds like something you find rather than something you make.

— Coraline