In the wake of his Cause And Effect cassette label and distribution service, Hal McGee launched Electronic Cottage International Magazine. From 1989 to 1991, its six issues focused on the independent home recording community - artists who had developed their craft in the post-punk DIY era. The contributors were nearly all members of the hometaper community. The magazine featured articles providing helpful tips and highlighted the challenges hometapers faced. It included insightful artist and label profiles. And it could be a hotbed of controversy and debate.

Though its mission was to serve the hometaper community, Electronic Cottage's coverage of independent music contributed as much as any of the era's publications. The 400+ pages produced stand as crucial documents of an era that was melting into the next. Before the algorithm, before the cloud, before streaming platforms reduced music to weightless data, there existed a network held together by stamps, international reply coupons, and magnetic tape. McGee had already proven the viability of this underground economy: through Cause And Effect, operated with Debbie Jaffe from Florida, he sold and distributed 5,000 cassettes in three years - releases by Merzbow, Nurse With Wound, Controlled Bleeding, Robert Rich, Vox Populi!, and dozens more. Electronic Cottage emerged as the natural forum for this community: a space where practitioners could share knowledge, debate principles, and document their activities for posterity.

What distinguishes these pages from other publications of the era is their intimacy. The writers were not critics observing from outside but participants sharing hard-won wisdom from within. The six issues capture a pivotal moment - the cassette network that had flourished throughout the 1980s beginning to sense the first tremors of digital distribution, an entire culture on the verge of transformation.

This complete facsimile edition, designed by Studio Bertin and published by Korm Plastics, preserves the full run in a handsome hardcover format. The foreword by Jerry Kranitz, author of Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit in the Pre-Internet Age, situates these documents within the broader history of post-punk independent arts movements.

For scholars of underground music, for veterans of the tape-trading networks, for anyone seeking to understand how creativity circulated before platforms captured it - essential testimony from the heart of the cassette revolution.