The basement where the city’s next sound is being taped
Every Thursday, forty people squeeze into a cellar to watch a band record straight to cassette. We spent a night with Les Cassettes Bleues.
The stairs are steep, the ceiling is low and the only light is a string of yellow bulbs taped to a water pipe. By ten o’clock there are forty people in a room meant for twelve, and nobody is allowed to talk while the red light is on.
Les Cassettes Bleues record everything live, straight to a four-track tape machine they bought for the price of a takeaway. No overdubs, no second takes unless the first one collapses completely. The audience is part of the recording: the clapping, the shushing, the bottle that rolls across the floor in the middle of the third song.
We wanted the tape to remember the room. Clean recordings forget where they came from.
“We wanted the tape to remember the room,” says the band’s bassist between takes, winding the cassette back by hand. “Clean recordings forget where they came from.”
Copies of each night’s tape are sold at the door the following week, numbered by hand. Fifty copies, never more. By midnight the stairs are full again, this time with people going up.
