i, Dale. How are you? Nice to meet you. Glad to hear that you’re pro-choice, how’s your lawn? Bye.”



“Yeah Bob, this is you know who and you know what who got you know what from you know where.”

“You know what, I don’t owe you nothing. Out of four years, you supported me one month. Out of four years, you have wrecked three of my cars; you have put me in the hospital three or four times. I owe you nothing and I’m not talking to you anymore.”

Who are these people and what were the circumstances of their lives that made them leave phone messages like this? Jacob Smigel disregards such questions on Eavesdrop: A Wealth of Found Sound. On it, the Vegas-based folk artist collects excerpts from 40 answering machine tapes, micro-cassettes, 8-tracks, and cassettes that he scavenged in the past four years. “We have an inherent desire to record, be it with paint, ink, or magnetic tape, what we see and feel,” he writes in the CD’s thick liner notes. His impressive collection spans from a 60-year-old, homemade 78 of kids yelping “Happy Birthday” and “Jimmy Crack Corn” to a tape of a mother demanding “fucking Pepsi now” from someone on the phone.

Eavesdrop comes at a time when hipsters and retrophiliacs are celebrating cassettes as the new vinyl. And Smigel’s finds most often document the moment when tapes were personal accessories, where people could preserve memories they would eventually forget. As such, Smigel considers himself a preservationist—most Americans today are less likely to record their voices for posterity and instead leave it to digital camcorders and cameras. That’s why there’s a prevailing sense of loss throughout Eavesdrop. It is history that is broken and scattered. Listening to the disc is like entering a library filled with books that lack covers and introduction pages.

Smigel goes for camp and novelty in most of his selections. He opens the CD with “Hamburger Hamlet,” an answering machine tape of two socialites who share their disgust over the alleged “lesbian” activities of the fast-food chain’s owner. Smigel even sells the rest of the tape on a separate CD, writing in his liner notes that the tape has business calls for a limousine service. Elsewhere, there are tapes of a mother nagging a kid who is singing to a tape, a music teacher delivering a Sahara-dry French horn lesson, a judge critiquing a marching band’s movements, and two rappers rehearsing over an electro-funk track. Smigel also features a karaoke singer hollering and screeching ten miles off-key to a R&B song, a scamp delivering a book report (“it’s an adventure book, so people who like the outdoors and stuff should read it”), and a mother yelling at her infant to say her prayers right.

The most bizarre tracks may scar your ears. “Fun Ladies” is an instructional tape on how to sell vibrators to a party of women. “Carol (1976)” features a grouchy art student, telling us that she will first record herself masturbate and then does so. She later listlessly reads off a rather dull diary entry of her day’s errands and how she rejected a schlup she met at a pizza place who wanted to fornicate with her.

Listening through Eavesdrop’s 70 minutes is an exhausting experience. Many of the recordings are good for a listen or two, while others have too much dead air to warrant even one. But that’s found art for you: the good, the bad, the ugly, the sexy—it’s all here in Smigel’s great introduction to a trove of lost history. That we don’t find out the who, what, when, where is the point. I’m sure Carol’s schlup feels exactly the same way.