Lost Media: Dennis Nilsen’s Casio MT-640

The original cassette tape, with handwritten notes by Dennis Nilsen.

As often the case when a person is serving a long prison sentence, creative hobbies become one of the biggest outlets for emotion. Living a restrictive life can often birth a desire to express ones self via visual arts, writing, or music. Dennis Nilsen found solace in composing and preforming music on a keyboard, and luckily, some recordings of this music exist. In the autobiographical book “History of a Drowning Boy” a photo can be found of a keyboard which belonged to Nilsen in prison. The Casio MT-640 was used to compose several works of music which were sometimes recorded to cassette tape. Several of these tapes have made it to the collectors market, and the one which came through our site several years ago was digitized for preservation purposes.

The total length of Side A is 57:00, and Side B comes in at 26:50.

Below is a preview of the first track, entitled Suite No 54 (HIROSHIMA). The recording, according to a handwritten note from Dennis Nilsen on the J card, took place in August/September 1995.