Cassette
Aside from Matthew Dear—the metamorphic producer/singer who helped get Ghostly International off the ground in a U of M dorm room—no one has been a part of the label’s musical fabric longer than Tadd Mullinix. Having first emerged nearly 25 years ago with the wild, scenery-chewing ride Winking Makes a Face (which was also the first official Ghostly full-length), Mullinix has recorded everything from mutant club music (X-Altera, The Dancing Box) to glassy hip-hop grooves (his tricked-out Dabrye trilogy) for the groundbreaking label.
After spending more than five years away from the latter to focus on his own BOPSIDE catalog and elusive aliases like Charles Manier and JTC, Mullinix has finally brought things back to the basics. From the very second “The Most Deliciousest” fades in—setting the scene with snappy breaks, honey-kissed harmonies, and a muffled horn melody—Super-Cassette sounds like it was lifted straight from 2001, the year Mullinix unveiled Dabrye’s first album (One/Three) and its singular blend of sleek beats.
In the decades since, Mullinix has labored over two ambitious LPs and brought larger-than-life MCs like Doom, Ghostface Killah, and Danny Brown into the fold, expanding the Dabrye universe well past its humble origins. He even got J Dilla to make a rare hardcore rap appearance on the instant classic “Game Over,” spitting locked and loaded bars alongside fellow Detroit rapper Phat Kat.
Super-Cassette embraces another extreme, serving up strictly instrumental dream states, stacked VHS snippets, and vaporized samples. Its time capsule tracks are more than a nod to Mullinix’s past, however; they’re actually rooted in high school recordings he filtered and funneled through a Casio SK-1 keyboard, delay pedals, and stripped-back software. Nestled within the nostalgia are gnarled hooks, links to old loops, and tape hiss undertones that harken back to an era when hastily dubbed cassettes took on a life of their own. “You’ve gotta hear this,” copy-of-a-copy style—that sort of thing.
Like any other master class in minimalism, it’s all about the details here, whether that means a majestic lead piano, lightly applied synth lines, and lumbering drums (“Yaya”); blankets of warm feedback and alien melodies (“Cascades”); or expressionist film cues, electro-acoustic effects, and phantom film scores (“Pearlclutcher”). Some pieces snap, crackle, and pop like rough sketches (“Rigby’s Dram,” “Toiler on the Creek”) or hazy memories, but that’s kind of the point. After all, what are flashbacks but a fully distorted version of reality?
