Big City Orchestra is the most-prolific surviving configuration of the American cassette-culture period and the single project that most clearly demonstrates how the cassette network actually worked. Reviewers regularly use the descriptor "almost comedically prolific." The Bureau files BCO at Tier II for forty-seven years of continuous activity, about 130 hour-long cassette releases on more than 100 partner labels, 300+ compilation appearances, the long-running TRYST magazine programme, the ubRadio operation, and a sustained collaborative method that has run consistently from 1979 to 2026. The configuration's scale alone is hard to match: there is no other artist file in this archive whose catalogue numbers run to this volume.
The founding facts. 1979, in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. The original function was as the house band for a network of artist residences · meaning several shared-living artist houses in the South Bay that needed something to soundtrack their parties and openings, and from which BCO later developed its long-form configuration. The project relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1980s, which has remained its base ever since. The relocation is significant because it placed BCO at the intersection of the Bay Area cassette-culture scene that later produced (among other figures) Don Campau and Lonely Whistle Music, Randy Greif, Brook Hinton and Subelectric Institute, GX Jupitter-Larsen and The Haters, Thomas DiMuzio, and several other long-running American underground figures. The collaborator-network section of this entry runs to perhaps a hundred names; the Bureau notes that the list is one of the better available routes into the American underground experimental scene of the period.
The dAS figure is central. dAS · the name rendered lowercase, occasionally as Das or das, often spelled in unusual ways across release credits · is the configuration's sole continuous member across forty-seven years. Multiple accounts file dAS as "an institution" (Thomas DiMuzio), "a gateway to the world of noise and experimental sound" (Ninah Pixie), "the one who brought not-so-community-minded stragglers like me into the fold of the noise / experimental side of the cassette network" (Brook Hinton). The dAS curatorial principle (rather than the dAS sonic signature) is the configuration's through-line. BCO releases consistently credit a rotating cast of co-musicians alongside dAS rather than treating BCO as a single-figure project, and the rotating-cast policy has remained in place across the entire catalogue.
The cassette-network scale is the catalogue's most cited feature. About 130 hour-long cassette releases between 1982 and the late 1990s, on more than 100 partner labels: Audiofile Tapes (US), Bog-Art (US), Doomsday Transmissions (Canada), Ecto Tapes (US), Freedom In A Vacuum (Canada), Industrial Therapy Unit (US), Lowlife Audio (US), New Flesh Tapes (US), Nihilistic Recordings (US), Peuleschille Tapes (Netherlands), S.J. Organisation (US), Seiten Sprung Aufnahmen (Germany), Sound Choice (US), Sound Of Pig (US), SSS Productions (US), Subelectric Institute (US, Brook Hinton), Tonspur Tapes (Germany), Tragic Figures (US), ZNS Tapes (Germany) and about eighty others. The 300+ compilation appearances across the same window route BCO through almost every significant cassette-culture compilation programme of the period.
The TRYST magazine programme is the other side of the cassette-network operation. Founded c. 1982 at Amy Leker's Virtual Image color-Xerox store in the Santa Cruz Art Center, TRYST was a self-published "magazine in a bag" companion publication: each copy contained an audio cassette (one side BCO, one side a featured guest band), color-Xeroxed images, little objects, detritus, toys · nothing standardised, nothing predictable, each copy slightly different. Original editions of 100, later expanded to 200. Brian Miller and dAS were the founding editorial pair. The 1982 BCO cassette also titled Tryst came enclosed in a painted Ziplock bag with the same approximate method and is one of the configuration's most collected early items. TRYST runs alongside with the cassette-culture mail-art ethos of the period but at unusual production-volume for a self-published magazine; the Bureau files the magazine as a separate Visual department entry in due course.
The live programme has been intermittent but consistently distinctive. The Perverted Percussion ensemble of 1991 (a touring BCO configuration with rotating membership) closed its run with the August 1991 CLUB O (formerly The Oasis) show in San Francisco; dAS's working diary, later reproduced on the Mindwrecker blog, documents the "good Slinky" routine in which a Slinky was strung up over the audience before the set, then mic-rigged and played during the closing song. The 1990 Santa Cruz bill that paired BCO (performing an entire set of Kate Bush covers) with Randy Greif, Eric Muhs and pre-recorded contribution from The Haters (BCO members performing the show by digging with loudly-amplified shovels outside the venue) is one of the catalogue's most cited live events. The bowed egg-whisk, the slinky-over-audience routine, the turntable destruction broadcast on-air at the Santa Cruz radio station, the masking-by-shovel-digging-outside-the-venue: these are the sorts of programme elements that the BCO catalogue routinely produces.
The CD-period catalogue (1991 onward) extended the project's accessibility. The Four Cassettes of the Apocalypse (Subelectric Institute, 27 October 1991) was the first BCO CD · rare live sets and studio outtakes from the cassette-culture period, with cover art by Pat Tierney (one of the BCO catalogue's most-consistent visual contributors). Greatest Hits and Test Tones (23 April 1993, second BCO CD) was the project's easiest single entry point: 43 tracks engineered and co-produced by Alisa Messer at Mills College. Later CDs and CD-Rs across the late 1990s and 2000s rounded out the catalogue's most-accessible format. The Bureau notes that the CD catalogue is small relative to the cassette catalogue (10+ CDs against ~130 cassettes) but is the better entry point for listeners new to the project.
The ubRadio operation has run alongside with the recorded catalogue. dAS's long-running San Francisco Bay Area radio programme functions as the public-facing curatorial outlet for the BCO operation and as a tastemaker programme for the American underground experimental scene generally; Thomas DiMuzio's account treats the show as having brought "new music to new ears" across multiple generations of listeners. The ubuibi sub-identity is the more solo / curatorial dAS configuration; runs alongside BCO rather than replacing it. The Bureau closes the entry with a note that BCO remains continuously active in 2026 through the bigcityorch.bandcamp.com direct-Bandcamp catalogue, continued CD-R and digital-only releases, the ongoing ubRadio programme, and continued collaboration with Ninah Pixie and other rotating partners. The configuration has not slowed in any meaningful way across the 2010s and 2020s.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Elizabethan era · last revised c. the Anthropocene