Your drummer friend likes to keep things tidy, and he's been urging you for some time to tidy up your home studio, especially the shelves at the back which are overflowing with electric cables, two metal poles without microphones, which were used to hang darts for a dart contest between musicians; the first dartboard bearing the effigy of Alan Parson during the creation of Eye in the sky and the second of Lalo Schiffrin in the middle of composing the theme for Mission Impossible. Tidying up this shelf won't be enough, you'll also have to tackle the studio's vault of high-value equipment, a worm-eaten wooden cupboard with yellowed, peeling paint in the scarlet tones once so popular with costume designers in the throes of Glam Rock delirium. When you open the cupboard, you're confronted with old recording equipment, still in working order, but which would be at home in the Abbey Road Museum... You shudder at the sight of the Tascam 4-track cassette with its forest-green shell, a formidable piece of equipment that still impresses you with the personality of its master channel, enriched with the famous shshshshsh, and its oversized mixing interface. Ah, the good old days of cassettes, mixes and remixes, frantic rewinding by twirling the machine around a pencil, serial duplications, demos on that you took everywhere and hope that you handed over to expert ears. Next to the 4-track is a shelf of cassettes as colourful as the multicoloured make-up of lyrical pop singer Kimera. Time has taken its toll on the ink on the now illegible labels. A diabolical angel whispers the delicious idea of further procrastination, and quickly abandoning the idea of putting everything back in order, you take out the player and plug in the headphone jack. It's time to listen to the first tape. In the end, the sound was quite warm. It's good to hear some classics still blazing on magnetic tape. Good old tape. more