Tale of the tape

Some things change, others stay the same. When I visit L Rock’s home, his living room shows his many creative projects. A bike upside down, that requires some repairments. His skateboards in another corner. A musical frequency chart on the wall. The many musical tools and equipment he uses: samplers, a keyboard, a microphone, compressors, mixing consoles, multiple screens, and more. They are positioned on his self-made desk spanning most of the living, tailor-made for his own work flow.

L-Rock, real name Ricardo Leverock, is half of the Eindhoven Hip Hop duo Don’t Accept Mass Notion, D.A.M.N. for short. The same tinkering, DIY process that was omnipresent in L-Rock’s present abode, also lay at the basis of their self-titled debut album, which Dutch newspaper the Volkskrant described as “the first true Dutch Hip Hop album” in 1989. The instrumentals on this album were made manually with a tape recorder. L-Rock used to manipulate the tape of the recorder with his hand to create loops by re-record specific sections over and over again. He would keep repeating this process until his loop was long enough, after he would add different samples on top of the tape to create his instrumentals. An older D.A.M.N. that predated the album was was also made this way with an Elvis Presley sample. It was a song everyone in the Eindhoven Hip Hop scene knew the words to: “Let me take you to Aruba where it’s hot”.

Producing with a tape recorder was a technique L-Rock had picked up through an off-hand comment from a DJ he rented a room from at the time. He had recently moved from Aruba to the Netherlands. Apart from his Technics, the DJ also had a tape recorder. One day he told L-Rock: “Did you know you could make loops with it?”. Because he wasn’t allowed to touch it, L-Rock waited until he went to work to sneak into his room to make beats in secret.

Looping was not an unfamiliar to L-Rock who also tinkered with cassette decks in Aruba. He would open them up to manipulate the tape that was safely housed inside better, although it never worked as well as the tape recorder. It was on the island that he learned about Hip Hop through American tourism, and he also started breaking and rapping. When he came to the Netherlands, he took Hip Hop with him. As much as he knew about the Netherlands through his ‘Dutch’ education, as little did the Dutch know about Aruba. Two places, intricately connected through a colonial legacy. Hip Hop helped to channel some of his anger and proved to be the converging point between countries; both continuity and rupture. The tape recorder itself thus paints a picture of the do-it-yourself mentality borne out of limited means part and parcel of Hip Hop culture, but also of historical specificity, and how roots, routes, and the material spaces we inhabit interact. The tale of the tape is in how cultural highlights such as the D.A.M.N. album came about, without foregoing the detailed material process that was involved in its creation.

Story by Dastan Abdali.

Dastan is an anthropologist who ethnographically researches the societal impact of Hip Hop culture in the Netherlands. He is currently a PhD candidate at Leiden University involved with the research program Re/Presenting Europe. He focuses on the creative practices of practitioners, and how these affect their wider surroundings and sensibilities that they take on in other areas of their lives. He is also a rapper and producer and is currently the managing editor of Conflict and Society (Berghahn).