Squires of the Subterrain
by RICH ARITHMETIC
Editor’s Note: This is a somewhat revised version of a post originally published in the 1980’s Cassette Culture Blog, March 5, 2026
No doubt many readers may be acquainted with the rise of Cassette Culture in the 1980’s, which coincided with the commercial emergence of 4-track cassette recorders. The new technology was particularly a boon for songwriters and musicians to record, overdub, and mix multiple instrumental and vocal tracks at home on cheap cassette tapes.
Of course, being recorded on cassette tapes meant that the fidelity and sound were lo-fi and certainly did not rival the audio quality of professionally engineered sound recordings. But those primitive 4-track recorders provided a great workshop for teaching musicians how to arrange and record their music. And the resulting explosion of home recorded music gave birth to a whole new musical underground as musicians gave out their tapes to their friends and fans and traded them with other home-tapers; fanzines were created that devoted themselves to reviewing the hundreds of new recordings that were floating around; and left-of-the-dial radio stations had whole programs devoted to broadcasting the best tapes from the cassette culture.
Cassette Culture! That’s where I got my start as an indie musician in the early ’80s, and despite the fact that the technology available to home recording artists these days is much more sophisticated, I still work and record with several of the artists I originally met and traded our primitive tapes with 30-40 years ago.
One of the earliest cassette culture artists I met back in the day continues to be one of its most prolific, Christopher Zajkowski, an extremely talented musician who channels all the best influences of the Sixties in his own music and releases his home-recorded masterpieces under the name SQUIRES OF THE SUBTERRAIN. Over the years Chris has released dozens of singles and albums on his Rocket Racket “record label” — initially releasing them on cassette tape and then graduating to vinyl and CD, but all recorded at home on analog tape with himself usually playing all the instruments and singing all the vocals, as he does on Evil Head, which is a great pop song from his 2008 collection, Feel the Sun.