History as Story on the Cassette Culture Podcast

[Images courtesy of Martin Franklin]
 
Background: In 1990-91, Martin Franklin released four cassette albums on his SoundImage Tapes label. Fast forward to recent years and Martin was contacted by Tom Gibbs of the Infinite Expanse label wanting to reissue the Premonitions: Underground Cassette Network 1989-90 compilation. Eager to contact the contributors, Martin set off on a quest that led not only to the 2024 reissue on Infinite Expanse, but the November 2024 launch of his history exploring Cassette Culture podcast. Martin explains:
 
“Tom contacted me about reissuing some of my SoundImage Tapes releases and I wanted to make sure that the artists who were featured on those compilations were happy that their contribution, which they made in 1988-89, was something they wanted to have shared again. So, I contacted as many of the artists as I could find. And having those conversations was such an extraordinary experience – hearing about what they’d done in their lives, how their careers had developed… but unfortunately we couldn't find some of the artists.”

Martin successfully tracked down several of the contributors, some of whom have been guests on the podcast. But finding one band in particular, Omega Ensemble, resulted in a quest full of mystery and a bit of Holmes and Watson detective work. Starting from an address on an old Omega Ensemble tape, Tom Gibbs went to the home these decades later and knocked on the door, only to learn from a neighbor that band member Phil Collins had lived there until passing away the week before. The later discovery of a flyer with all the band members names led Tom to finding and arranging a call with two other band members.
 
This dedicated search plays out over several episodes of the show. An Englishman now living in Australia, Martin makes his living in podcast production: “I already had the experience and the tools to put this thing together. Once I started doing it, I realized that this was the project I’d been looking for. Learning that Phil Collins had just passed away made me think… I want to collect these stories, and I want to be able to share them, because it all happened in the pre-internet period where documentation is harder to find. A lot of these stories from our generation are being lost. So that just inspired me to think we need an audio collection of these life stories and the music and cultural context that they had”.
 
Episodes have included Martin and cohost Hudson Graham talking to Premonitions compilation contributors Steve Gears and Sandy Nys, Frans de Waard talks about his Vital zine and working at Staalplaat, Justin Mitchell discusses his Cold Spring label, Dave Henderson talks about his early 1980s ‘Wild Planet’ column in the Sounds weekly, Daniel Plunkett reminisces about his ND magazine, and more.

There’s no grand plan to the trajectory of the podcast. ‘Story’ is the key. Martin continues: "I hear a lot of interview-based podcasts because I produce a lot of them for my clients. And I just felt like the formal interview format was a bit unsatisfying for this context. I wanted to present something that gives the listener a sense of the experience and what it’s like to open these mystery packages that arrived through the mail and contained these handmade, original artworks, the music and so on. That morphed into the sound design approach, which we now wrap around the podcast. I think it wasn’t clearly defined as a format when I started doing them, but now I feel like it’s getting into its stride. It definitely seems to me like I want to have the connections between the episodes suggested across the whole series. So, you might hear about a label or an artist mentioned in one episode, and then their own story will emerge in another episode later on. I’ve got this visualization like you see in some detective shows where they have the corkboard with the photos and bits of string joining the connections together. That’s the way I’m visualizing this sort of mapping – we’re using the network that we’re discovering as the means of guiding the evolution of the episodes.”

The mystery packages Martin mentions are among my personal favorite segments of the episodes. Martin and Hudson on-air unpack boxes of tapes, flyers, correspondence, zines, etc. that Steve Gears and Sandy Nys sent them. The excitement of discovery is palpable as the ‘unboxing’ progresses:
 
“I wanted to bring to life the experience of the packages and what it feels like to get them. I’ve invited guests who come on the show to join this segment which involves them sending me a package of either archival or current material that they have. And we’ll open that and go through it and do a bonus episode that’s basically the whole thing. And then an edited version that perhaps contains bits of music that were sent as part of it. Getting the material from Steve Gears was phenomenal because he had kept a lot of cassettes and correspondence that he had for all that time. And that led to some really useful clues in our hunt for the Omega Ensemble."

Though my motivation for this article was to promote the Cassette Culture podcast, I learned fascinating details about Martin’s background that give context to his place in cassette culture history…
 
Jerry Kranitz (JK): I know Discogs can be dicey on accuracy, but it lists four tapes released on your SoundImage label.
 
Martin Frankin (MF): That’s right. The releases spanned 1989-91. At the time, I was working with a lot of different musicians in different groups and different permutations. We were creating a lot of material on cassettes that were made available at gigs or, in some cases, never had a formal release. At the same time, I was working with a theater company writing music with Michael O’Dempsey, who was eventually a member of my TUU trio. We were working as a duo composing music for theater shows. We did a soundtrack for an exhibition and a couple of our own sound installation pieces. And all this atmospheric sort of music. Some of that was assembled and sold on cassettes at the shows, but in very small quantities. Kolbe was reissued on Infinite Expanse last year too.

JK: How did your SoundImage label get started?

MF: In the UK, there was pretty large-scale unemployment among young people in the mid-late 1980s, and some genius in government had an idea to create something which they called the ‘Enterprise Allowance Scheme’. This was a way for unemployed people to join this scheme and thus not be counted as an unemployed person and not have go each week to the job center office to verify that you had been looking for work. What it did was legitimize you in creating a micro-business, and you got a small amount of money each week to survive. My micro-business was doing live sound for gigs and running a cassette label, so that kind of focused the idea. Ok, this is going to be SoundImage Tapes. I released four cassettes, which were Invocation by Martin Franklin and Richard Clair, the Premonitions compilation and a follow up called Spiritual. And Devices and Desires, a split tape with Richard Leake and Peter Appleton.
 
JK: Why only four tapes?
 
MF: I guess the reason it stopped there is because I was part of so much concentrated activity at that time, things just really took off. On one of the releases, I was sharing music with Dino Oon and Konrad Kraft, who sent a cassette of their stuff and had a track on the Spiritual compilation. And I had sent them some music that I was working on, which was the formative thing of me, Richard Clare playing wind instruments, and Michael who had been doing soundtrack stuff as the trio TUU. We exchanged cassettes as you did and I had no idea at the time that they were running a label, which was called SDV Tonträger. They replied to my cassette saying they’d love to release it on CD on their SDV label. Our first CD, One Thousand Years, was on this boutique label in Germany.”

That was in 1993, and it just coincided with the ambient wave hitting in the UK. We were like post-rave era. The release on SDV gave us visibility. Shortly after that, we had a second album released on Beyond Records, which was a very happening small label at that time run by Mike Barnett, who was from Birmingham in the Midlands. He was probably the most artist friendly label runner that you could wish for… really supportive and really behind what his artists wanted to do. He was releasing a lot of stuff under that Ambient banner. He subsequently released All Our Ancestors, which was the second TUU album.

So, that all happened. We got an agent and were touring and doing concerts both in the UK and in mainland Europe. We’d get a series of dates and go off and play Amsterdam and Paris and a festival in Belgium. It was just such an exciting time that the SoundImage label kind of got put on the shelf. Because my own music career started and ran for a decade after that.

JK: I was Googling and found the Martin Franklin and Richard Clare Invocation tape from 1990. I was listening on YouTube and the music is beautiful. I see there was an LP reissue on Oryx Records. Their Bandcamp page describes it as a precursor to TUU.
 
MF: I was contacted by Oryx Records, which is a Spanish label, about reissuing this kind of proto TUU release, which was basically gentle percussion, winds and electronic drones. Richard and I gigged as a duo doing this kind of material. As I explained, I guess it was a sort of melding of different strands that I was producing with different people. So, I asked Michael if he would come and play synths and samples and electronics to augment the duo. TUU was a really memorable part of my career, performing this amazing, evocative ritual ambient music live and working on the recordings.

We followed up our album on Beyond with a couple of releases on a label called Fathom Records, which was a sub-label of Hearts of Space, based in San Francisco. In retrospect, they weren’t as hooked into the network in Europe as we believed they were, but at the time they were releasing great albums by Robert Rich and Steve Roach and the like. At some point in that period I got in touch with Eddy Sayer, who was the percussionist in a group called Lights in the Fat City. We started doing some work together which eventually resulted in a new project we called Stillpoint. We did an album called Maps Without Edges with a wind player named Nick Parker that was released on Beyond. And then it kind of stalled. After the Stillpoint release I did a small set of recordings that were released on the Italian label Amplexus, still under the TUU name, but Michael had relocated to New Zealand at that point.

JK: Are you still making music?

MF: I think I am, but very slowly. The impact of my life journey and having a child and moving to live in a country the other side of the world… it’s kind of reframed things in a way that I don’t have that time available to get into the creative space. And I’d kind of gotten out of the habit of being in the creative space. It needs a lot of time and personal freedom. If an artist can just switch it on like that they have a real gift. But for me, I need a lot of time to home into it and play around with things that aren’t necessarily aimed at making anything. So, I think that’s where I am now, a play stage of getting back on the tools and getting to play with new sounds and finding out what it is that I want to do.
 
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I encourage readers to check out the Cassette Culture podcast. Start at the beginning, listening to all the shows to get a sense of the unfolding story. And then bookmark it to keep up with new ones. And do check out Martin’s music from the past in the links throughout the article!