Kubus Kassettes

Kubus Kassettes (sometimes also called Kubus Cassettes or Kubus-Kassettes) was a Dutch cassette label, founded in 1980 by Rob Smit. Rob himself was musically responsible for several releases (sometimes under his own name, sometimes under various guises), but he also published music from other people, such as Act Of God, Pain and Enno Velthuys. Many of the releases of Kubus are quite ambient and abstract, but also industrial music, soundscapes, objets trouvées and even mainstream rock were released through Kubus. At the end of 1981, Rob's activities had expanded to an electronic music studio, distribution channel of underground music on cassette, music courses, a cassette shop and the label itself. He started to use the name Kubus-Kommunikaties (or Kubus-Communicaties) for all these activities. From the beginning of 1982 he also introduced a more uniform sleeve design concept and he reissued the early releases (KK 001 to KK 006) in this new sleeve concept. By then he used the label name Kubus-Kommunikaties for the cassette releases as well, but later on he returned using Kubus Kassettes again (with the addition that it was a subdivsion of Kubus-Kommunikaties). To make things even more complicated the last cassettes (from 1984 on) were released partly under the label name Kubus Cassettes (mentioned on the sleeve but on the sticker on the cassette itself the name Kubus Kassettes was still being used) and the first one was previously released under the name Q-bus Kassettes. However, for the sake of consistency, all cassette releases are indexed under Kubus Kassettes. In 1984 Rob decided that he could not make a living out of music any more, and started a career in journalism. He worked as a music journalist, videogames journalist, technology journalist and science journalist respectively. During his writing career he kept selling stuff by mailorder / online (music, books, videogames) as a secondary activity, culminating in his current Discogs store (for link see below).