Binatone Galaxy is an installation for used cassette players that looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded by digital audio players as recording and playback devices, cassette players become, in this work, instruments in their own right.
The piece takes irreverent delight in disposing of the prerecorded tape inside a cassette and replacing it with a microphone that amplifies the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous audio shells. Instead of hearing sound recorded on magnetic tape, the listener hears the sound of the two plastic spools rotating, the machine’s motor-hum, and the sound of the crude, sibilant amplifier. --Steven Cornford, excerpted from Musicworks issue 112