For about eight years the most important distribution network in heavy music was the post office, operated by teenagers, running on blank cassettes and international reply coupons, and it moved more information than every record label in the genre put together.
Tape trading is the single most underrated fact in the history of extreme metal. Without it there is no thrash, no death metal and no black metal, because the parts stay in the towns where they were made.
How it worked
A band recorded a demo on whatever was available, often a rehearsal room cassette deck, and ran off copies. The copies went to addresses printed in the classified pages of fanzines and in the back of magazines: a name, a street, a country, and a line saying what the sender had to offer.
The recipient copied the tape, sent his copy on to three other people, and posted a list of everything he now held. Nobody made money. The etiquette was rigid and it was enforced socially: you sent a blank tape and return postage, you did not sell what you had been given, you wrote a letter with it, and you answered the letters you received.
Within a couple of years there were thousands of people doing this across a dozen countries, and the network had no centre, no owner and no way of being shut down.
What it sounded like
Terrible, and that turns out to matter enormously.
Each copy is a generation, and analogue copying is lossy in a particular way: the top end disappears first, then the transients soften, then everything acquires a bed of hiss. A fourth generation tape has no cymbals to speak of, guitars that have become a single smear, and a vocal that is more texture than voice.
So the bands who learned from those tapes were not learning from the records. They were learning from a degraded rumour of the records, and when they set out to reproduce what they had heard, they reproduced the degradation as well. That is a direct technical explanation for why the international scenes came out rawer and more extreme than their sources.
What it moved
The list of recordings that did their work on this network rather than in shops is long and includes some of the most consequential tapes ever made.
No Life til Leather, recorded in July 1982, reached the entire American underground and eventually a market stall in New Jersey, which is how Metallica got a record deal. Slayer, Exodus, Possessed and Death all circulated the same way before anybody signed them. In Europe the traffic ran in both directions, and the German bands were sending tapes to Brazil while Brazilian tapes came back.
Sepultura in Belo Horizonte are the clearest case. There was no shop that stocked what they wanted to hear, imports cost a fraction of a monthly wage under catastrophic inflation, and what reached them were copies of copies. The band that resulted sounds like nothing in Europe or America, and that is why.
| Component | What it did |
|---|---|
| The demo tape | A band's entire promotional budget |
| Fanzine classifieds | The address book |
| The blank cassette | Under a pound, and the whole medium |
| The letter | Compulsory, and how the scene actually formed |
| International reply coupons | How postage worked across borders |
| The compilation album | The point where tapes became vinyl |
What it was like to be in it
Slow, and the slowness shaped the culture in ways that are difficult to convey now.
You wrote a letter. You waited three weeks, or three months if it was going to South America. Something arrived, and it might be the tape you asked for or it might be something else the sender thought you should hear. You listened to it repeatedly, because you had one copy and no way of getting another, and you wrote back.
That rhythm produced attention. A record that took four months to arrive and cost the price of two cassettes and international postage was played until it wore out, and the listener knew every second of it. It also produced friendships that lasted decades between people who had never met, and a genuine sense of obligation: you passed things on because somebody had passed things to you.
What ended it, and what replaced it
Compact discs, which are harder to copy at home, and then the internet, which made copying instantaneous and free and removed the only thing that had made the network a community, which was the effort.
The functional replacement arrived quickly and works far better. A band in any country can now be heard everywhere within an hour, and the revival of thrash after 2005 would not have happened without that. What did not survive is the etiquette and the correspondence, and the people who were in it are unanimous that the loss of the letters was a real loss even though nobody would go back.
The other half of the distribution machinery, the compilation records that turned tapes into vinyl, is dealt with in Metal Massacre, and the full account of the period is in this part of the history.
The fanzines that made it possible
The network needed an address book and the fanzines were it. A zine in 1984 was a stack of photocopied A4 with typed interviews, hand drawn artwork and, crucially, pages of classified advertisements from people looking to trade.
Some of them turned into institutions. Brian Slagel's ran in Los Angeles and became a record label. Others ran for a few issues from a bedroom and stopped when the person making them went to work. Circulation was in the hundreds and the influence was out of all proportion, because every copy was passed round a school or a scene.
The letters pages did the social work. Somebody in Ohio wrote in asking whether anybody had heard a German band, three people replied, and a corridor opened between two countries that no record company had bothered to connect.
What survived on tape and nowhere else
A significant part of this genre's history exists only as demos, and the archaeology of it is still going on.
Bands who split before recording an album left one rehearsal tape that circulated to a few hundred people. Line ups that lasted six months are documented by a single cassette. Songs that were later rerecorded exist in earlier, faster, angrier versions that never made it onto anything official.
Much of that material has now been digitised by collectors and put online, often in poor condition, and it has changed the historical picture in places. Bands who were assumed to be following a trend turn out on the tapes to have got there first, and the chronology of who heard what has been quietly rewritten more than once by somebody uploading a cassette from a shoebox.
Sources and notes
The No Life til Leather demo is dated July 1982. Descriptions of trading etiquette follow contemporary fanzine accounts and the published recollections of participants.
