The score of Steve Reich's Violin Phase specifies that the performer is to recapitulate aspects of the composer's creative process in the studio. Working with a four-channel tape recorder, the violinist and a sound engineer are given detailed directions for creating the basic tape loop that generates the performance tape used in live performance. And yet – no doubt due to the scarcity of appropriate tape recorders – most present-day performers of Violin Phase use looping hardware or software that make it possible to dispense with many of the instructions in the score, including the necessity of having the engineer on stage. That this significant change in performance practice seemingly passes for the most part without notice demonstrates how the decades-long ubiquity of tape has been replaced by a kind of invisibility, through which the particularities of the medium have been subsumed into more generalized notions of fixed media. I argue that the specific materialities of tape and tape machines are not incidental to Violin Phase, but are central to its composition, performance, and reception. A focus on the role of tape, and indeed on the roll of tape itself, can illuminate this and other pieces as well as Reich's deep involvement with music technologies throughout his career.

This article considers the relationship between audiotape's material affordances and the audibility of cultural practices. Not all changes in the materiality of sound media are audible to listeners, and not all changes in the audibility of cultural practices require changes in their material support. Thus focus on the affordances of sound technologies – those possibilities of sound technologies that may or may not be engaged by its users, and the wide range of practices that such technologies support – can help to connect materiality and audibility. I address the affordances of audiotape by examining a number of small case studies where established sonic practices encounter a transition from phonography to audiotape: musique concrète and the tape loop, serialist composition, and Les Paul's use of overdubbing. Finally, I consider the nature of the audiotape archive and its mode of access in order to pose some general questions about the meaning and use of audiotape's affordances.

This article is a case study of wrecking, based on a database of hundreds of shipwrecks that occurred between 1780 and 1870, in what is today Estonia. Through a qualitative analysis of narrative sources, it examines the wrecking activities of manorial lords as well as of their peasants. Contrary to the international scholarly tradition, which views wrecking as an activity of the common people, this article sheds light on the deceptive and opportunistic activities of manorial lords, who were responsible for enforcing the law at the local level by performing police and court functions, but who, at the same time, benefited on a large scale from wrecking. The article contrasts this with the opportunities coastal peasants had to wreck for their own profit. In wrecking and salvage, the three characteristic elements of peasant-landlord relationships – exploitation, partnership, and patronage – emerge. In contrast with studies focusing on the friction between peasants and their lords in regions dominated by manorialism, this article argues that, in wrecking, their collaboration apparently proceeded without much conflict in this period.

This article argues that global labour history (GLH) and global economic history have much to offer each other. GLH would do well to raise sweeping questions – for instance about the origins of global inequality – engage more with theory, and increasingly use quantitative methods. Instead of seeing labour and labour relations as historical phenomena to be explained, they can serve as important explanatory variables in historical analyses of economic development and divergence. In turn, economic historians have much to gain from the recent insights of global labour historians. GLH offers a more inclusive and variable usage of the concept of labour, abandoning, as it does, the often narrow focus on male wage labour in the analyses of many economic historians. Moreover, GLH helps to overcome thinking in binary categories, such as “free” and “unfree” labour. Ultimately, both fields will benefit from engaging in joint debates and theories, and from collaboration in collecting and analysing “big data”.

Susan Rogers has lived many musical lives. As a faculty member at Berklee College of Music, she directs the Berklee Music Cognition and Cognition Laboratory, expanding her research in auditory memory, which she began during her doctoral studies with Daniel Levitin at McGill University. She also teaches analogue studio production, drawing on two decades of experience in recording studios. She is especially well known for her years working as Prince's staff engineer (1983–87), a period in which she not only encountered Prince's own unique uses of tape, but also created his now-infamous tape vault. In many ways, the immediate impetus for this interview was Prince's untimely passing on 21 April 2016. In previous interviews, Rogers had already emerged as a lucid commentator on Prince's work first-hand, but that context adds a certain emotional heft to this interview, conducted one month after the pop music star's death.

Sonic traces of the Third Reich have held significant memorial power in post-war Germany. This article traces three works that sample one of the most well-known recordings from the Nazi period: Joseph Goebbels's declaration of Total War, delivered on 18 February 1943, and broadcast on newsreel and radio the following week. In both message and material, this recording epitomizes Friedrich Kittler's claim that tape is a military technology. The works examined span different memory debates in post-war Germany: Bernd Alois Zimmermann realized Requiem für einen jungen Dichter (1967–9) as West Germans were engaging in the first public discussions of the Holocaust, Georg Katzer's Mein 1989 (1990) is an East German composer's early response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, while Marcel Beyer's novel Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes, 1995) reveals the continued attempt to address the legacy of the Third Reich after German Reunification. Analysed together, these works create new configurations of discourse about wartime memory, moving away from geopolitical contours. Each of these artists transforms tape's wartime uses – namely dissemination and encryption – into forms of memorial labour. Through their physical and conceptual manipulations of tape, these artists create less deterministic readings of the Nazi past.

This article offers a history of the compact cassette in Poland from 1963 to 2015, focusing on its vibrant presence as the medium of choice for unofficial musical culture. I explore tapes’ capacity to reveal a history of everyday musical and technological fluencies: as a sonic archive they offer a window into networked epistemologies of sound under state socialism. Listening to homemade tapes – a process that builds on ethnographic encounters with their makers – I explore the work we can hear across the medium's noisy recordings and stress their position at the crossroads of musicology's methodologies. Tape's reusability, so carefully explained in historical anecdotes and technical manuals in the 1960s, facilitated democratic debate for the social movements of the 1980s. The format's fungibility and plurality made it not only a convenient conduit for discussion, but also a medium that – in form and substance – modelled the importance of dissent, revision, and return in political discourse.

In a 1958 speech at the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt took stock of the progress that human rights had made since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ten years before. Mrs. Roosevelt had chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration and had hoped that, in time, it would become “the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere.” Her answer to the question of how to measure human rights progress has become one of the most frequently quoted remarks of the former First Lady: