JK Tapes 1 double cassette

The planets have aligned and driven me to write about a 2007 release in 2010. I dug it out again TODAY and it still proves to be hugely inspirational musicwise/packagewise/the whole thing. 'Various artists compilations' are a fairly useful thing in my book. The internet allows us to steal anything we want for a preview but that just makes sifting out the good stuff even more difficult. I absolutely love the 'Best Of Ethiopiques' comp and it's led me to tons of amazing stuff, but the JK tapes comp stands alone. Most because I can't even read the tracklisting to work out which artist is which most of the time.

The beauty of it is that although I don't have a clue who most of these bands/artists are every song/piece (?) has something amazing about it. This thing covers so many bases and it all fits together. Whether it's some guy singing about how strange his voice is or a torrent of free rock bilge everything is right on the money. Most of it is pretty lo-fi and even when i'm not a fan of the song there's always some distorted drumbeat or funny noise that's totally new and gets me thinking about some new noises I could make myself using my own crap equipment.

The artwork on this thing is mindblowing too. You have to stare at the tracklist for about ten minutes before it starts to appear in front of you and only then can you try and connect it to the coloured/spraypainted tapes. When you do finally work it out and try and find information on different artists a lot of them are already long gone.

The massive effort that's gone into the whole package is staggering and makes me want to give it a go myself. I suppose painfully average stuff and terrible stuff can have a similar effect but this is a release on which other releases should be modelled. So good work JK Tapes. I'm going to take the inspiration and run straight into 2010. Hopefully like Rocky Balboa running up some steps as opposed to a headless chicken running straight into a wall. Time will tell!

Miraculously some still available here