80s Underground Vol. 4 ~ Experiments with Cassette J-Card Generators

 

I have been sick this past week. I think it might be bronchitis. I’m not diagnosed yet but I went by the color of what I’m coughing up (stop me if this is too much info, lol). It could also be pneumonia too. Woo hoo. I will be seeing a doctor hopefully today. It’s been a week of insomnia, fevers, headaches, and excruciating throat pain due to coughing up my lungs every few minutes. A little bug my son brought home with him from school; he bounced back after a couple days, fortunately, meanwhile a week later and I’m still like the walking dead.  Anyway, being in bed a lot, I’ve been focusing on my mixtape hobby. 

Someone in one of my cassette groups on Facebook was showing off a mixtape he did of obscure 80s music. I was thinking “wow, a kindred spirit, I already have three mixtapes like that”. He went the extra mile by generating a custom j-card, which for those not in the know is the name for those labels on the inside of a cassette case. I decided to be a copycat and make my fourth 80s Underground mixtape using his method. Of course, I’m going to have to wait a while to share it in any cassette groups so I don’t look like a complete copycat of that other person, even though I am. After a bit of searching and checking a few different websites out, I settled on this one. 

Here is the template of the website. You have to be careful switching tabs in your browser because it will lose all your hard work. Best thing to do is type the track listing out in a word document and then copy and paste it in. I looked through lots of pictures of 80s goths for the cover. The one I settled on is a portrait of Rozz Williams, singer of the band Christian Death. I made sure to include at least one song from the band to justify using it. As for the songs, they’re mostly selections from my YouTube playlist The 1980s in Music. I made sure not to pick anything that was already on the other three tapes. To fit the whole track listing on the cover I had to use a small font. The template seems like it was designed for short album cassettes that only have like ten songs, but you can make it work if you shrink the font down and forgo a few unnecessary additions like what type the cassette is. I can’t imagine using a tape any longer than 90 minutes though, unless you have a lot of long songs on there to bring the track listing down. Another thing to think about if you’re going to do this is that your playlist is going to be pretty much set in stone, you can’t decide to record over a song with another song or else you’ll screw up the J-card. With a normal J-card I don’t mind putting little sticker labels over my writing or white-out when I make an edit, but that wouldn’t work with this. You could just print out a whole new J-card, but that would be a pain. 

Hopefully you can already read the track listing on the cover, but since I still have it typed out I might as well copy and paste it here:

Side A

Fehlfarben - Paul Ist Tot

Dance Macabre - No Answers

The Pulse - Plastic Man

Donación Agnelli - Lo Antiguo

Pornografia - Electrownie Atomwe

The Klinik - Murder

Vomito Negro - Fire Burns

Blood and Roses - Enough is Never Enough 

Blood Fetish - Cause Mistress

Fear Condition - Black and White

Smirnov - Savé

Side B

SigloXX - Sister Suicide

Christian Death - Deathwish

Altar Ego - Altar Ego

Threshold - I Want You

Vivabeat - Working for William

Voodoo Church - Egypt

Lost Loved Ones - The Dark

Magnum - Sacred Hour

A Scanner Darkly - Cigarette in the Rain

XDavis - Window to the World

Kill the Messenger - This is America

Sculpteurs D’Ombres - L’Ange Noir

A nice mix of post-punk, new wave, early industrial, and a little bit of metal. Here is how the spine came out:

It even let me add Armenian letters. Unicode hieroglyphs work too, I tested it out but I didn’t print the results. That opens up lots of possibilities. You can change the text and background colors too. One of these times I’ll use a black background with red letters. But white worked better with this particular photo. 

Here’s the whole happy family, 80s Underground Volumes 1-4:

 

I will have to marathon these tapes again. Plenty of time for that when I have bronchitis and can’t do much of anything else. I’ll be making some even prettier J-cards once I really get the hang of it. But I don’t think I want to do it for every single mixtape, just special themed ones like this.