This is the history of Land-O-Newts!

This is the history of Land-O-Newts!

Here’s what happened.

It was 1986.

I was living solo in a 2 bedroom house in Eugene, Oregon, playing in a band and working a few part-time jobs to make a living. At this point, I was DJing at a gay bar, doing morning janitorial and prep at a pizza joint, and being on-call for the local stagehand’s union.

In the summer I got booted from my first band, and was a little bit at a loss about what to do musically without them. I’d always been interested in recording and making music, and cassette 4 track recorders were becoming readily available. Imagine that - you could have an entire multi-track recording studio in your living room! With overdubbing, I felt I could do anything musically.

So I took out a loan and got a Tascam 246 Portastudio, a couple of cheap mics, a drum machine and a digital delay unit. I stocked up on blank cassettes, and I was off and running. It took me a year or two to pay off the loan - which as I recall was $1,500? A lot of money to me, especially then. It’s impossible to overstate how much this simple act changed my life.

I already had my guitars and a couple of synthesizers, and was not shy about borrowing instruments. Plus, there are lots of noisemakers in any home - kitchen utensils, toothbrushes…. You name it. I started recording my own music at home, by myself, on my own terms. Sometimes people would come in and jam, most notably my friend Ole “Jeff” Peterson.

But mostly, it was just me. There was no one there to tell me what to do or how to do it, or whether my music was “good” or not, and I didn’t care. I was in heaven. I felt as if I could do anything. I was having a blast. I’d come home between shifts wiped out, but with so many ideas I couldn’t help but record them right away.

Stepping back for an observation - this access to recording technology was a big deal for musicians and sound artists. Being able to circumvent commercial studios and traditional label distribution created a seismic shift in the world of independent music. With a relatively small investment, musicians of all kinds now had the power to make fully realized multi-track recordings. Most of us recorded in our bedrooms or living rooms. A lot of us did all the instruments and vocals ourselves. And most of us were just a tiny bit crazy.

Cassettes were a cheap and easy medium to record on, and, if you knew the basics of recording, the sound quality was very good. It was always very easy to make copies of your tape albums, and with a little creativity and a trip to the neighborhood copy shop, you could make your own cassette covers (J-cards) and posters and whatnot. But what to do with all this music?

Enter the wild, wonderful world of tape trading. I was in my local music store a year after setting up my studio — maybe Light’s for Music? - and perusing the magazine racks. I idly picked up Sound Choice, and flipped through the pages. And then I saw it - Tape Trading listings! I believe the format was short reviews of tapes by people who wanted to trade, along with their mailing addresses and conditions for trade. Almost no one asked for money - and everybody wanted to trade their music for yours.

I saw a review of a “double album” (two cassettes!) by someone in California called Don Campau, and decided to trade with him. I sent away copies of my first two tapes (“Burning Through” and “Dangerous Household Objects”) and in a couple of weeks I came home to find the legendary “Piñata Party” recordings in my mailbox. My mind was completely blown. The music was so great! Don and I traded for years, and even collaborated on a few songs here and there, all on cassette, and all through the mail. We’re still friends to this day, and have even met in person a couple of times over the past couple of decades.

And that’s what happened. That’s how Land-O-Newts! came to be. The name was a mashup that came from staring at a package of Land o’ Lakes butter while trying to think of a studio name, and the fact that I, a life long fan of newts, at that time had 8 newts in my living room in a 50 gallon tank. (I’ll talk about the newts in another article. Because the newts are a huge part of my life, and have always been my studio mascots.)

Many, many more recordings were sent out and received between 1987-1993. I even got an amazing stack of LPs of independent music from Poland! Suffice to say I heard some of the most amazing and formative music of my life during those years. In the mid 90s I finally became too overwhelmed with the amount of music I was getting, and the amount of paying work I was having to take on was preventing me from participating in trades. In early 1994 I headed out to San Francisco for grad school, and things changed for good. And my commercial studio WaterDog Studio was born. But I kept the DIY attitude and ethos in my music and in my heart, and I always will.

In the past few years I’ve been reviving the Land-O-Newts! label and putting out my own recordings again. On CD for a while, a cassette here and there, but it’s mostly digital now. This site is the archive and hub of my music old and new, and hosts the continuation of Land-O-Newts Records. Thanks for being here!

Heather Perkins

09/26/24

FLUFFY

  • A mascot

  • A muse

  • A hero