“One-Sided Conversations: The Strange Intimacy of Secondhand Answering Machine Tapes.” On Brian Random’s Answering Machine Favourites [Anniversary Edition], Limited Edition, Cassette Tape (2025).
Language of Error
A machine, in the likeness of a human voice, declares: I am not here now. The utterance, a mechanical event, arrives laden with paradox. In 1991, Alan Sidelle, in the Journal of Canadian Philosophy, worried about limits of this utterance, asking: What does it mean when a machine—an answering machine—asserts absence? Semantically, the proposition resists itself: if I am here now is tautologically true in human discourse, then I am not here now, when spoken, is false. And yet, in the answering machine’s instance, the statement attains a kind of truth. One is, indeed, not here now (provided there is one additional assumption, that you are not screening your calls).
Let us pause. Two questions emerge at once: First, why should this problem concern Canadians in particular? Do the boundaries of logic shift in the great white north? Are Canadians easily confused, unable to distinguish the voice of their friends from that of the machine? Second, why do philosophers insist on dressing simple matters in the baroque finery of a paradox? If an answering machine is nothing more than an automated surrogate, then is it not obvious that I—in the machine’s voice—is not the machine but rather the absent person it ventriloquizes? Much too quickly, Sidelle dismisses the assumption that I refers to whoever utters it (he simply asserts this claim is unassailable). But is it not the case that the answering machine utters this in a form of bad faith, speaking for rather than as its owner?
Consider a secretary. A call is received. The secretary replies: So-and-so isn’t here now. The logic remains untroubled, Canadian or otherwise. It is only the answering machine’s peculiar, simulated I that generates confusion—an affectation of presence masking an absence. Or, put differently, does the answering machine’s claim to selfhood expose a defect in language, demonstrating that language use is often informal and imperfect? It seems when my answering machine says I am not here now, it actually means so-and-so is not here now and, this is how we, at least as Canadians, interpret it. That is, we don’t spend the rest of the day wondering why we can hear the machine if it is not actually there. To take this one step further, only the most insufferable among us refer to themselves in the third person. All of this is simply to say, answering machines are surprisingly strange objects.
Brian Random’s latest excavation—an anthology of lost voices, siphoned from the dispossessed cassettes secretly smuggled out of thrift-stores—offers a peculiar archaeology of the incidental and the intimate. These are the marginalia of telecommunications: the forgotten, the failed, and the unintentionally avant-garde.
The utterances are recursive and self-conscious:
Testing, testing, one, two, three.
Is this thing on?
How do I turn this thing off?
I’m feeling pretty turned on. How about you?
What’s that noise?
I have no idea what’s going on.
Go turn it off.
You sound like you are in a tunnel.
Each phrase a fragment, each fragment an index of an absent body negotiating the strictures of a new technological mediation. But the truly disquieting moments emerge elsewhere, in those uncanny machinic encounters: a recorded voice attempting to con an answering machine, a mechanical operator extending an employment offer to a fellow automaton, an act which can only be described as dystopian. A series of conversations not intended for human ears. One can only imagine Sidelle, upon hearing Random’s tapes, transcribing new theorems of telephonic paradox. A landscape where speech is decoupled from intent, where the machine listens but does not understand, where our voices persist, orphaned, leaving someone waiting for a return phone call that will never come.
Perhaps he would frame it as an ontological crisis: if a machine can deceive another, does deception require intent? If a machine can be offered a job, does employment require agency? The answering machine, after all, was never designed to answer—only to defer, to record the silence between intention and reception. And yet here, in these ghostly transmissions from the past, it seems to have become ensnared in the economy of the future.
Thrift Store Ethics
Brian Random’s found answering machine tapes propose a different order of philosophical interrogation, one that straddles the thresholds between ephemerality and permanence, between neglect and exhumation, between ethical transgression and historical salvage. We might regard these small spools of magnetic tape as objects estranged from their original function now orphaned by technological obsolescence. Random, the scavenger, the ethnographer of voicemail’s material unconscious, has exhumed them from their resting places, their answering-machine-shaped coffins, and placed them into a new and unanticipated afterlife. What, then, is the nature of this act? Is it one of theft or of radical preservation? Is Random a latter-day Robin Hood, absconding with the residue of private lives only to redistribute them as objects of cultural inquiry? Or is he, rather, a clandestine trespasser, a purveyor of voyeuristic sensationalism?
It is undeniable that these tapes, collected en masse, construct an archive of the mundane. This is precisely their allure—the clipped conversations, the reluctant confessions, the stammered greetings, the hurried apologies, the ex-lover’s beseechings, all constitute a repository of voices that otherwise would have vanished into oblivion. Unlike letters, whose intended audiences are explicit, or photographs, which bear the physical imprint of their subjects, the answering machine message is a peculiar hybrid of the spoken and the discarded—meant to be heard, erased, then replaced. Literally, ephemeral ephemera. When separated from its original recipient, it undergoes a shift in status. What was once an ephemeral, functionally transient mode of communication is reified into an object of aesthetic pleasure and historical curiosity.
Yet, in liberating these voices, Random also commits a violation. The issue of consent looms heavily over such an enterprise. Did these speakers ever imagine that their voices, their brief and banal, yet intimate, utterances, would become the subject of public consumption and desire? Certainly not. And yet, we might ask whether consent remains a meaningful category when the speaker is absent, when the author has dissolved into the past. The archive, after all, is filled with involuntary subjects, individuals who never foresaw their inclusion in history’s index. Does the answering machine tape warrant the same ethical scruples we apply to diaries, medical records, or private correspondences? Or, due to its mundane functionality, does it somehow exist beyond these concerns?
Beyond the question of privacy, we must also consider the politics of neglect. That these tapes were abandoned in thrift stores suggests their original owners deemed them worthless. What, then, is the ethical status of an object relinquished to the indifference of the resale economy? Isn’t some of the onus on the person getting rid of the machine? Is the true crime not Random’s act of appropriation, but rather the structural disregard that made such an archive possible in the first place? If no harm befalls the individuals whose voices populate these tapes—if, indeed, their anonymity is preserved—does the act of retrieval constitute a transgression, or does it instead liberate these artifacts, these voices, from the oblivion to which they were otherwise condemned? It is tempting to argue that the cultural value of these tapes—the unfiltered glimpse they provide into the textures of everyday life—outweighs whatever nominal harm might result from their public dissemination. After all, it would be nearly impossible to track down any of the speakers on these tapes, suggesting that there is a built-in layer of anonymity. On many occasions I have heard Random offer up the following advice: “If you want to be anonymous, always use a pseudonym.”
Aesthetics of the Answering Machine
Unlike its digital successors, the analog answering machine, with its spools of magnetic tape, preserves its messages materially, embedding them in the physicality of the medium. The cassette tape is an artifact of compromised fidelity, engineered for length rather than warmth, for function rather than aesthetic pleasure. And yet, it is precisely these deficiencies—its limitations, its distortions, its susceptibility to degradation—that render it an object of fascination. The answering machine tape is a medium marked by imperfection. It crackles with the artifacts of its own inadequacy: the hiss of cheap tape stock, the warble of misaligned playback heads, the sudden dropouts and clipped edges of voices truncated by the machine’s automatic message-limiting function, its incessant beeping, the low drones, its reluctance to shut-off once the recording has begun. Combine this with the telephone and its ringtone, beeps and blips, and propensity for feedback when combined with a live speaker, and you have a device that shares many affinities with the aesthetics of noise music, a genre which rejects the polished surface of conventional audio recording in favour of the raw, the accidental, the sonically abject.
Brian Random is a noise artist, attuned to the poetics of disruption and the syntax of signal decay. In these cassettes, he finds a wealth of unintended compositions—the stuttered speech of a hesitant caller, the abrupt mechanical cut-off at the tape’s end, the overlapping voices of continual re-erasure—all become part of the sonic texture. If fidelity is a form of submission to technological perfection, then the answering machine tape resists such obedience. Unlike the vinyl record, which crackles nostalgically, or the reel-to-reel tape, which hums with a warm, analog presence, these cassette tapes sounds brittle, fractured, barely sufficient to complete its task. It is a medium of interruption rather than continuity, of erosion rather than preservation. Time itself is registered in its inconsistencies: messages degrade, voices warp, magnetic particles detach and drift into oblivion. Each playback is a diminishment, a slow unwinding toward silence.
In this way, the aesthetics of the answering machine tape resonate with the larger project of found sound and archival appropriation. Sound artists have sampled the airwaves using scanners and radio receivers, capturing stray signals and voices trapped in static. No abandoned cassette, forgotten reel, or disintegrating quarter-inch tape is safe from resurrection in the hands of an artist. The act of collecting these tapes, of scavenging them from thrift stores and junk shops, is an act of aesthetic salvage—a recontextualization of the overlooked and discarded. As a sound artist, Random does not merely extract meaning from these tapes but allows their inherent materiality to dictate new forms of composition. What was once an incidental, functionally compromised recording now asserts itself as aesthetic material, as a document of entropy and affect. There is a melancholy to this nostalgic process, a sense that each recorded message is both an invitation and an artifact, a trace of a past event we no longer have access to.
Kevin Ain’t Coming to the Wedding and Other Casual Non-Encounters
A message within a message, a delayed communication within a delayed communication:
That’s over a hundred and-fucking twenty-five dollars each. Get out of here. Ain’t gonna happen.
Okay, what else?
Kevin left me a message, he ain’t coming to the wedding this weekend.
And… What else?
Didn’t miss much more after you left last night. Just drank more. Sat in the hot tub. Played with the fire. Funny, after you left, the conversation about les politiques never came up once again. But that’s alright.
Ahhh fuck! I have nothing else to say. BYE!
The caller alludes to an unfinished conversation, one that was evidently important enough to be noted since it potentially caused the intended recipient to leave last night’s party, but also not urgent enough to be continued after he left. The voice speaking here performs a kind of inventory. “Okay, what else?” It is as if the speaker is rifling through a box of thoughts, discarding them one by one until there is nothing left. The message is, at its core, about what is missing. The caller speaks, not to communicate, but to confirm an absence: the loss of an event, the dissolution of a conversation, the vacated space where Kevin might have been, and the lack of things to talk about.
The telephone offered connectivity at a distance, yet in doing so, it often heightened the very isolation it sought to overcome. One of the episodes in Random’s collection explores the architecture of a telephone chat line. The chat line constructs another telephonic paradox: an artificial space where voices gather to meet without meeting. We hear “Tuli” record herself navigating “Rick’s Interactive Phone Pub,” a space that feigns the warmth of human interaction while offering only a low-resolution facsimile. The setting is almost aggressively unconvincing: the sterile bad muzak, Rick’s gratingly manufactured “cool voice,” the mechanical menu of social options, the selling of time in exchange for time with someone who might be of interest. And then, as punctuation, the sound of a toilet flushing—one final, absurd gesture that lays bare the underlying enterprise for what it actually is.
There is an enigma embedded within this recording—not one of narrative nature, but of existence itself. Why does this tape exist? What prompted “Tuli” to document this ephemeral auditory space? Is it the same impulse that drives a caller to leave a message? An urge to inscribe absence or a desire to let others hear what will inevitably vanish. More than likely, it was the desire to catch a cheating partner who denied using the chatline. We speculate, but the amateur documentarian’s true intent remains a mystery. If the tape is voice, and the voice is ghost, then all that remains is the spectral logic of transmission and loss.