My brother-in-law and I have been working through the Dune graphic novel adaptations together. When I finish each volume, I send him the book along with a piece of custom art. It started as a way to share the reading experience across distance, and it's become a tradition I look forward to.

For the first two books I drew some custom art with Copic markers. But by the third volume, my interests had shifted as they always seem to be doing. I've been deep into abstract ink work lately, and I've been spending a lot of hours with cassettes: recording, restoring decks, thinking about tapes as objects.

So this time, I made him a bootleg cassette.

Hans Zimmer's Dune soundtrack dubbed to cassette, with a hand-painted J-card. For the art, I took the official soundtrack artwork and reinterpreted it in my current style. I masked hard lines on hot pressed watercolor paper to create the edges, then dropped ink and worked it with brushes, sponges, bits of paper building up colors and textures in layers. Sometimes I'd scratch away sections and refill them with different colors. The result is something that references the original but feels like it went through a process to get there.

I dubbed the tape on my Marantz PMD720, which gives a warm, reliable transfer and just makes me happy to use.

Of course, he could stream it anytime. But a cassette is a thing you hold. It takes up space on a shelf. It says: I made this, and I made it for you.

I don't know what the fourth volume will bring. Maybe more tapes, maybe something else entirely. The gift becomes a record of where I was creatively when I read the book.

This one's in the mail.