Cassette Tapes and Soundscapes

As a performance poet, I like to combine spoken performance and visual storytelling and use an array of visual props that often recycle my personal past archive of artworks as an artist from the last twenty-five years into the present. Conversely, this Perspective article is a reflective account of how I make use of sound during my live solo performances by way of C90 cassette tape recordings I have made spanning the course of 30–40 years. Whilst the article refers to a selection of live (poetry) performance works that I have made, the article concentrates discussion on three works which use cassette tape recordings in different ways to create soundscapes that often transport the listener to the past and/or the listener is unsure of how many voices there are in the performance space. The first performance I discuss is How Can I Get My Partner To Be My Finger? (2019) which presents a conversation between a couple – one present, one technologically distant – my partner Alex and I and refer to and discuss how Alex ‘speaks through’ my finger via a tape-recording. In discussion of the second performance, SEE ME: A Walk Through London’s Gay Soho 1994 and 2020 (2021), I refer to how I make performative use of a mixtape compilation that I made in 1994. Lastly, in discussion of the third performance, Tackle (2022), I refer to my usage of a cassette recording in 1996 of a football match I attended with my Dad between Chelsea and Manchester United

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