tapes have become a recent guilty pleasure of mine. it is real fun to hunt readily available cassettes for cheap. it is a welcomed addition to the vinyl collecting game, which nowadays pretty much consists of pre-ordering and paying quite some cash for rare titles. to not get too caught up in buying tape after tape i set a rule for me: don't buy stuff you already have on vinyl. well, of course there is always an exception to the rule.
i am a big nile fan. they are part of what i consider my big five (converge, mastodon, between the buried and me, high on fire and nile). for those bands i go above and beyond and when i saw a tape version of nile's 2012 opus "at the gate of sethu", i couldn't possibly say no. the cassette was released by small czech label evil horn records three years later. unfortunately my copy got a flaw in the song "tribunal of the dead" on the b-side. two pretty harsh disturbing noises were reason enough to ask for a replacement at animate records, the distro i bought the tape from.
they sent me a new one but sadly it was flawed too. strangely not equal flaws but on two songs of the b-side this time. don't know what went wrong in the production but i won't ask for another flawed tape. i consider to dub the tape myself but i have to collect more information about the process. apart from the actual cassette the j-card is an absolute winner. alternate cover art to the vinyl release and all lyrics and more art inside the fould out j-card. very nice! 100 copies made (has anyone out there also a flawed or maybe even a flawless copy?). evil horn records. 2015.
