Some Quality Time With Nick Anderson of Far Out Cassette Club

Far Out Cassette Club has been keeping Salt Lake weird for nearly six years. With their distinct brand of bizarro field-recordings, self-help tapes, and the occasional doom-metal release, the Club always leaves its members guessing as to what's coming next. I got to sit down with label head Nick Anderson and talk through Utah culture, smoking random hash in Egypt, and what it was like living in a real-life version of Footloose.

The mark of the beast.

Stuburban: Did you grow up in SLC or did you relocate there later in life?

Nick: No, I grew up like an hour outside of SLC in a place called Spanish Fork. Then went to college in southern Utah before moving to SLC in like 2015.

S: What's Spanish Fork, Utah like? My knowledge of the state is poor, and I ignorantly assume it's just a lot of desert.

N: It’s kind of north central Utah, so it’s still basically next to the Wasatch range of the Rockies. Long, snowy winters and hot as shit summers. At the time, Spanish Fork was like semi-rural, I guess. Like 15,000 people or something. It was very suburban, but at the end of my street there were still just big swaths of farmland I’d cut through to get to my elementary school. I think at one point we had the the most baseball fields per capita because there weren’t a ton of people but every kid played baseball for some reason [laughs].

S: [laughs] I think you and I are similar ages. That was definitely a trend in the early 90's; every kid playing regardless of skill. I was bad, personally. Did you play a lot of baseball?

N: No, I didn’t play at all and it felt like I was the only one who wasn’t [laughs].

S: Is that what led you to getting into music? Was there any kind of local scene in Spanish Fork?

N: My mom was a lifelong piano player and sang a bit in the past. My dad was always a fan of music and had a pretty big record collection that he still has, other than the ones I snuck away with. But ultimately I think the reason any of my siblings really got into music was when my brother got his first guitar. I was kind of hooked on the idea after that, but wouldn’t start playing or really actively listening to music I liked until I was 11-ish. Local scene in Spanish Fork was small. We had a small venue attached to a music store which was the only designated [place] to play in town. When I was in high school our punk scene was probably the biggest of the music scenes. Lots of local punk bands. I was in at least one. But to get [to] be a part of a real scene you’d have to drive north to be closer to SLC.

S: What were some of the bands that came out of Spanish Fork at the time? Including yours, of course.

N: I had two main high school bands: Ralph S Mouse was kind of indie, shoegazey stuff, name inspired by the book The Mouse &The Motorcycle, which I loved as a kid. Then I had a totally Death From Above 1979 ripoff band with a friend called Giraffe Fights that was super fun and the shows always fucking sucked [laughs]. I don’t remember the names of most [of] the bands that existed around my time, but in the following 15 years, I saw [most] of the punk guys that stuck with music go through the punk-to-country-folk pipeline. I had been doing singer-songwriter folky bullshit since I was like 16, but keeping it to myself because it felt a little too vulnerable.

N Continued: I sat in on drums once for someone else’s band, and one of my high school buddies played bass. He ended up doing dungeon synth stuff. I’ve put out a bunch of his tapes. His project is Spaceseer, but he’s probably one of the few musicians I’ve stayed connected to from that time period.

S: Oh yeah, I'm familiar with Spaceseer. That's very good stuff there. Was there a mass exodus of Spanish Fork bands to SLC?

N: Hmm, not necessarily. I think if you stayed in Utah after high school and wanted to be a part of a music scene you probably ended up spending all your time in Salt Lake. Provo also has a small scene that is impressive for how small of a place it is. It’s like 99% Mormon and they foster a very musical culture. A significant number of households around me growing up had pianos in the living room or people who played instruments, but Provo feels very stuck in the early 2000s hipster-folk-acoustic stuff [and modern era] very inoffensive indie rock shit. It’s good but it’s been done to death. I swear to god, stomp-clap-indie could’ve been invented in Provo, Utah.

S: You mentioned going to school in southern Utah. What's the culture like down there? Any art or music scenes of note?

N: [laughs] Man, sometimes I talk about this and people legit don't believe me. When I lived in St. George the city was literally hostile to any efforts to make it more music friendly. The city had an actual “dance permit” that businesses had to apply for if they wanted customers to be allowed to do anything more than stand still and watch an artist. There was a venue that lasted about a year, but already had so much trouble with the city and would get cited for “dancing”, like actually the plot of Footloose - coincidentally, filmed in Utah. So they closed down and I think it was basically a wasteland of culture. The last few years there has been a lot more of an effort for people to host house shows or run shows at private spaces. There was one coffee shop with a stage area attached for local bands to play, but the sound was run by whatever teenagers were there at the time and my brother and I had played a few times there and just cleared the room [laughs].

S: Are you kidding me? What year was this? I honestly expected a somewhat bizarre answer but never on the level of "dancing was a crime."

N: [laughs] Yeah, the venue famously had "PLEASE DON'T DANCE” painted on the wall really big. [This was still happening around] 2010 to 2011. No dancing on Sundays either [laughs]. The bureaucracy in St. George was out of control and the city council was strictly big prudes.

Read more about St. George and it's dance laws here.

S: Absolutely insane. Are these laws still in effect?

N: I’m not sure. Hopefully they’ve been amended, or [they] at least made the [licensing] process easier. When I lived there these laws were in effect, and there was a single bar in town appropriately named The One and Only. There was a small theater I started DJing at for college nights, but the city bought it from the owners and [did] nothing interesting with it. But now there are like seven bars I think, and they often have live music, so things are changing. St. George is the closest city with more than one stoplight to Zion National Park, and it’s a major stop between people traveling from California going north, so I think they realized they had to chill out to attract any type of tourist revenue. I have musician friends who still live there and I can’t imagine why.

S: So you moved out to SLC in 2015, what inspired you to do that?

N: All my old friends were living here and I wanted to be near them again, mostly. I had studied journalism in school, and my first writing job was in downtown SLC. I ended up hating [journalism] and sold my soul to marketing instead.

S: Did you take to the SLC music scene pretty quickly? Had you been a part of it prior to moving there?

N: I didn’t know anything about the local scene, and it took like three years of being there before I actually started playing shows. I was making some music in college, but it was like sad-boy-bedroom-lo-fi-beat bullshit because I didn’t have any music gear besides a guitar and no one to play with. So that was my only project initially, and eventually I was introduced to a guy who was doing beat nights at some bar where producers would go play mostly hip-hop instrumentals they had made and some live electronics. So I put together a set of my stuff with live drumming, samples, and me singing, and it went well enough that I got invited back more often. But just through that I ended up meeting more and more people, and then when I started Far Out Cassette Club that was really my way [to] explore more of the music scene here. And the rest is history, but I was glad one guy was willing to take a chance on booking me based on a pretty shitty SoundCloud collection [laughs].

S: Let's jump right into the meat of this meal and get down to some FOCC. Your first release listed is exitbox which I think can best be described as lo-fi calliope music. I guess first and foremost here, what inspired you to start this "label?"

N: So the story is pretty simple. I wanted to release my own music on cassette, and I looked first at services that produced tapes and they all had minimum order sizes and they were way out of my budget. As someone who grew up recording stuff with tapes, I figured I’d just do it myself. Then I thought I’d offer to do it for other folks who wanted short runs of tapes and I did my best to find ways to do it affordably. That exitbox release is a collection of recordings my older brother made on a single Casiotone MT-70 that was given to my mom by my middle school band teacher. They taught at the same school and over the years all but one of my siblings had been in his class. In hindsight I’m honored that he thought we should have it. That keyboard has been used on a huge percentage of my musical projects. RIP Mr. Seely.

S: The first album that turned me on to FOCC was the casio clearwater revival self-titled. Can you tell me a little more about this release? It was a peak-Covid soundtrack for me.

N: [laughs] that album rocks. So a friend of mine who I grew up with - and have played music with my whole life - just randomly sent me the most lo-fi Casio cover of some CCR song that he recorded straight to a shoebox tape recorder. I was so blown away by it [that] I knew I had to release it officially to the world. He finished a few more songs and took the cover photo and we turned it into a tape. It was definitely well received which I was thrilled about. Shortly after that I think we did one more release together before he decided to start making his own tapes and now he’s known as Lo Fidelity Cassette Tape Perplexity and The Boys. All his releases are absolute magic.

S: Oh wow, I'm very familiar with that project, thanks to you actually! Always great stuff. You've got a couple different "series" as I like to call them that I want to talk about. First and foremost the "You..." series such as "you listened to 10 Brian Eno albums at the same time and started floating" and "you were put on hold so long you astral projected through time and space." They almost feel like a dystopian take on the self-help tape trend of the 90s. What led you to create these?

N: Yeah, good question. I actually have no idea when the idea first came to me. I think the first one I did was the the “acid is kicking in at the Grateful Dead show” which was a really low effort edit of one of their live shows. I think mostly I was just fascinated by the auditory aspect of psychedelic experiences. Everyone talks about what you SEE when you’re tripping but never what you HEAR. So in that edit, I incorporated loops and distortion and tried to make it disorienting. The following tapes in that series are all over the place and generally more abstract, but I still liked exploring the idea of a thematic audio experience, especially if the experience was sort of bad or uncomfortable. Generally I try to wrap them all up calmly to bring the listener back to reality nicely. I actually have other unreleased projects to add to this series of tapes. but I just haven’t bothered finishing them up yet.

S: It's funny you mention those tapes being designed as audio experiences. I remember listening to "dissociating in the 6 with my woes" and having to get up and take a walk after I finished it. There's a similar series you do where it's recorded experiences of your own life. The album that turned me into a FOCC member for life was "watching robins and playing harmonica in the backyard." Can you tell me a little more about this recording? Was it spontaneous or did you have it in the back of your mind to do one day?

N: [laughs] [dissociating in the 6 with my woes] I feel like is particularly unsettling. The first time I listened to the final version I closed my eyes and guessed how long I had been listening, and at like eight minutes in it already felt like a half hour [laughs]. Yeah I guess the robins tape and [you smoked too much hash at an egyptian wedding and had a panic attack] would sort of qualify as lightly edited field recordings, but I suppose still are meant to illustrate a specific auditory experience for the listener. I actually don’t remember much about planning the “watching robins” tape. I just love my backyard, and at the time I was trying to explore the harmonica a little bit, so I just sat on my back patio and used my phone to record a single take of me playing three or four notes for like 45 minutes. It was wonderfully meditative, taking really deep breaths and trying to hold a note for as long as possible. Then I figured including a little piece of my backyard with each tape would be fun.

[Editors notes: each tape came packaged with a leaf.]

N Continued: Honestly, most [of] the bootlegs are pretty low effort. But when I get a weird idea I have to try and finish it in a single sitting otherwise I might lose steam and move onto the next idea [laughs].

S: Glad you mentioned the [egyptian wedding] because that's where I was going next. What's the story there?

N: This was truly an experience. So, I was in Luxor, Egypt with a friend of mine. Everyone there has a little hustle they use on tourists, or if they can set up their friends to hustle some tourists they’ll alley-oop it. Anyways, we got to know one of our taxi drivers throughout the day and he was cool, so we hired him to drive us around the next day and he told us to come to a wedding with him that night. He picks us up and takes us to some random alleyway where a bunch of rugs had been laid out, and the street was full of people just chain smoking cigarettes and hookah. There was a wedding band of like five dudes playing drums and some stringed instruments that I didn’t recognize, and then a guy singing. But it was all running through the most blown out PA, and they had cranked the delay to insane levels.

N Continued: So that was already pretty disorienting, and there were almost no breaks in the music. But then I saw dudes passing around a small glass, [and] they were covering the top with a piece of cardboard. Inside the glass something was smoldering, and it would fill the glass with smoke and then they’d uncover just a bit of the top and inhale the smoke. I asked our taxi driver [what it was] and he said it was hash. And I, overconfidently, tried two full glasses. Then all the color drained from my face and the music was getting very overwhelming. I tried to just power through it, but it was just getting crazier and crazier.

N Continued: After a few minutes everything was spinning and I truly thought I was going to pass out. Then, at that moment, some dude came from nowhere leading a goddamn bedazzled horse through the wedding; just right through all the hashed out Egyptians sitting on the rugs. The horse was so clearly displeased. That was when I had to tap out. So I told my buddy that I had to get the fuck out of there and the taxi driver was like “Yeah actually I’m ready to go to, but we have to stop for groceries first.” So the dialogue at the end is actually him yelling out the window of his cab at someone to grab bread and stuff at some store while we’re in the back [of the cab] and I’m high as shit [laughs]. Anyways, during all that I luckily had the wherewithal to record it on my phone. That guys hustle was just trying to show us a good time so we’d tip him heavy [which] I made sure to do that after the wedding [laughs].

S: [laughs] Wow! Okay so we're gonna back up a bit. Did you manipulate the recording in any way? Or what we're hearing is what you heard? Because it truly sounds like madness, [the vocals] being blown out with the delay effect.

N: The beginning is completely unmanipulated. Then at some point I crank up the distortion and weirdness a bit before I transition to the end. But yes, the majority of the audio is completely untouched.

S: Insane. Secondly, I had made up the narrative in my head that you had been invited to this wedding, but you're saying the opposite is true? You crashed this wedding?

N: Yeah, I had no idea who anyone was. The taxi driver was just like “there’s a wedding tonight and you should come!” But honestly I don’t know if that would even be unusual or not. I mean, maybe unusual that someone brought two random US tourists, but not unusual to have random people at your wedding party.

S: Are you a seasoned hash smoker or were you just caught up in the moment?

N: [laughs] No, I don’t think I had ever smoked hash - let alone concentrated shit - but I wasn’t going to pass up the experience. The story was worth it.

S: You are an extremely brave person. What's next on the horizon for FOCC?

N: Brave or stupid I guess. I stepped away from the duplication-for-hire stuff earlier this year, and now I’ve been focused mostly on collaborating with local artists I like to create unique tape releases. I’ve wanted to try experimenting with taking the role of producer/recording engineer/creative director and so far it’s been fun to explore the stuff outside of just making the music or tapes. I’ve got some releases lined up that should be dropping throughout the summer leading up to Far Out Fest, which is now in its fifth year and is gonna be nuts. Most my energy from May to September goes into overproducing that event. And it’s not been officially announced yet, but very soon I’m hoping to open a DIY venue in my garage and start booking regular shows. It won’t necessarily be under the Far Out umbrella, but they’ll be interlinked for sure.

S: That sounds like a lot of great stuff. Nick, thanks again for you time here. Anything else you'd like to plug before we close things out?

N: I don’t think so! Thanks for letting me ramble.

You can find the complete Far Out Cassette Club discography here.

Got a question for Nick? Leave it in the comments and we'll be sure to get it to him!