Cassettes

I've been convinced that the ultimate format for obscure annoying hipness would be laser disc. You'd have to track down a high school science teacher to play it.

LD-R

deep house producer Lerosa released a cassette-only album last year, "a deliberate move by the label owner to allow for more freedom to the artist, less financial risk by label while still producing a tangible object"

review & streaming audio here: http://www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/lerosa-dual-nature/

cant wait until i have to pick up new ambient/drone releases on dictabelt

Just noticed that there's going to be an EMP presentation on this from Michael Mannheimer:

"Big Wave Rider: Cassette Tapes, Inverted Nostalgia, and the Creation of Glo-fi"

As we approach the end of the aughts—a decade where the fundamental way we listen to music changed, one MP3 blog at a time—an interesting phenomenon bubbled up in the underground: a yearning for a recorded medium that went out of style 20 years ago. Looking into the past for inspiration is hardly original, but when Dirty Projectors sent out advanced copies of their new record, Bitte Orca, the fact that it came packaged as a tape was more than a novelty gag. Last summer, a whole wave of hazy, nostalgic music popped up, bedroom recordings from artists in New Jersey and Texas, complete with bullshit genres (glo-fi! chillwave! disco-jangle?) that were more almost as much fun to coin as they were to listen to. Music trends are always circular, but what is it about this particular scene that lusts for a time before everyone recorded on a MacBook? The one common thread (er, spool) between all these disparate recordings is a medium that, until the last few years, was seen as even more outdated than a VHS: the cassette tape.

In this lecture, I will examine the rise and resurgence of tape culture by talking to a host of underground tape labels and distributors—including Portland, Oregon''s Eggy Records and Iowa City''s Night-People—about releasing music via an archaic medium in an era of instant gratification. As technology advances, why are we continually looking to the past? Is the medium the message, or is it the music that really matters?

i like "but what is it about this particular scene that lusts for a time before everyone recorded on a MacBook?" but i'm not sure the writer gets just how depressing and absurd the idea of recording onto a laptop is for a lot of people. it doesn't necessarily always sound good, but recording onto cassette forces you to work with your sound in a real-feeling way that's really hard but generally sounds less flat than garageband presets.

yes

This'll probably be the breakout piece on it all.

My mix tape exchange club is meeting tonight!

i don't think i'll ever go back after CD-Rs, tbh

There were a staggering 8.6 million cassettes sold in 2004

The fuck? I can't think of a single record shop that sold them by that point - I know they're still a dominant format in some African countries for example but that's a SoundScan figure!

. "I only listen to cassettes," Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore told CBC radio last summer.

Did he say it while sitting in front of his vinyl collection? Or is that so five years ago, or whenever the last documentary he was in was shot.

http://vinylcast.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/thursten.jpg

I DON'T SEE ANY CASSETTES, THURSTON!

C'mon guys he tapes all of the vinyl onto cassette before he listens!

And then copies all that into his iPod, so he can be a pretentious fuck like the one interviewee in the Pitchfork article claims.

reckon Thurston can be a pretentious fuck without any of that : )

i bought a powerviolence tape in burlington vermont and record store dude told me thurston moore had bought a copy.

he's everywhere you want to be, buying everything you want to buy. usually the last copy.

If you're not checking out Marc's posting of the complete interviews he did for the Pitchfork piece, you're missing out:

http://desnoise.tumblr.com/tagged/cassettes

Cassettes are exponentially cheaper to reproduce (roughly 1/10th the cost of vinyl) and exponentially more aesthetically appealing to us than CDrs, so, after weighing our options, we made our order for 200 blank tapes and tons of blank cases. We do all our distro and design. Part of this is probably us growing up embracing punk ethics. Part of it is just the fact that we are working on a small scale right now.

he's everywhere you want to be, buying everything you want to buy. usually the last copy.

― PANZER DIVISION DEVO (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Monday, February 22, 2010 1:15 PM (8 hours ago)

Sometimes he gets screwed, too. I heard a story about when he found some super rare Stooges record at a shop and was trying to play it cool, some fan started excitedly chatting him up. When he got to the counter to pay the fan saw what he had and made a scene, thereby alerting the clerk that maybe he should take another look at the price of that particular record. Thurston went away empty-handed.

"...and that fan's name...was Avey Tare."

http://samuelatgilgal.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/paul-harvey1.jpg

Not feeling this piece
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/116282-reconsidering-the-revival-of-cassette-tape-culture/

going to read that in a little bit, but

At best, the cassette revival is merely a vacuous fad of no genuine value; but at worst, it's a confused, regressive cultural misstep more dangerous than most would care to admit.

uh

http://www.hvchronic.com/volume_2/no_1/CryingIndian.jpg

Deerhunter, so much to answer for

ya that is the dickinest review, but dude basically sets himself pretty far apart from the fun-having crowd pretty early on through the read

The signs of deliberate regression are everywhere: vinyl LPs continue to (re-)grow in popularity; micro-communities built around fan zines and basement shows continue to burgeon; lo-fi home recording remains a spirited exercise in anti-consumerist, anti-corporate production and distribution; and, most recently, the inexplicable comeback of cassette tapes has confirmed its status as veritable hipster zeitgeist. Would it be a stretch to suggest that these are, at least implicitly, hostile gestures?

the point that cassettes have been made irrelevant by cd's and mp3's in terms of sound quality and convenience is worth making, but not everyone wants to only listen to music on their computer no matter how diy that would be. it's like he's really furious about people liking something because it's nice-looking and cool.

Geez, somebody would do well to get out of their head for a bit.

Comment by jgraff — December 4, 2009 @ 9:01 am

I really doubt most of the current wave of cassette releases are *recorded* on cassette. Probably digitally recorded and only reproduced on tape.

You cynic

We rock four tracks in Como.

xp: speaking from experience, bumping digital recordings to analog mediums does improve the sound

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK WE'VE BEEN HERE FOR YEARS

"As we approach the end of the aughts—a decade where the fundamental way we listen to music changed"

NO IT DIDN'T

2001 - The Year Everyone's Discmans Broke

I can't wait for a MD revival (because I have a MD player on my system and it's been useless for so long...).

xpost
hahaha

as mentioned earlier in thread, dadahack are going to use the cassette format but in a revised form : http://www.outpostmedia.co.uk/dadahack/Dadahack_TAP3.pdf

is that a real thing?

i believe it will be, but yet to see it in real life.

I am going out right now to buy blank micro-cassettes to release new album on.

This was my rig when I was 12:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/169305913_89ad027265.jpg

I guess I'm a nerd because I always thought cassette computer things were so tremendously exciting.

is there a good place to get cheap cassettes either online or in los angeles? we just got a second car that has a cassette player and i'd like to stock up on some good old school shit.

1. Thrift stores
2. Garage/yard sales
3. eBay lot auctions (I got rid of most of mine years ago by selling them in parcels of 100)

that's what i was thinking...i went to amoeba and i'm kinda surprised at how expensive some of the cassettes they're selling are. $4-$6 bucks in a lot of cases.

you really only need one case per cassette

D-D-D-D-D-D-D-DAD JOKE!

You'd be surprised at what people are dumping off at thrifts and yard sales. 50 cents for a cassette of some old rap or pop or something. They don't sound too bad on mp3 if you have decent equipment, better than the vinyl sometimes. I wouldn't put it on a mixtape but just for listening around the house or blasting at a party or in the car they are fine.

"Yeah, cassettes are definitely the new vinyl these days."

cassette tapes are the new vinyl

good old thread from 2003...

It's an old joke, Katherine. Anyway, I searched ILM and it seems to be an overlooked aspect of cassettes, though I might have missed something.

No you're right, it's a totally novel topic. Thanks Francine.

I'm going to make 10 copies of a mixtape I put on Soundcloud last year - have bought clean new tapes and covers and I need advice on recording

I could find a 2nd hand cassette deck, connect it to my stereo's tape out or my external sound card, and then make 10 separate recordings (not too much of a hassle) - but what cassette deck should I use? I seem to recall that a tape plays back best on the same deck used to record it - are some decks more 'neutral' than others?

I realize the sound quality won't be stellar either way, but I want to do this as well as I can

PS I bought the clean tapes via https://tapeline.info/v2/ which seems like a really cool shop, and if I release a proper album at some point I might use their duplication service

graphic designer Art Chantry on FB:

"back in the 1980's, there was a HUGE cassette tape underground that emerged. entire careers of superstar acts started in that scene, but the bulk was produced by DIY weirdoes with no money trying to get attention.
the result was some of the most amazing and bizarre and downright brilliant packaging design I've ever encountered. basically a cassette tape is small (tiny) and crummy - cheap! that's the point of it. how do you make it interesting?
up steps geeks and oddballs and weirdoes with their amazing imagination and a lot of time on their hands. at The Rocket we saw all sorts of amazing items get delivered. this can is a fine example what I'm talking about...
one favorite that arrived at The Rocket was a weird sort of starburst package made out of pieces of 2x4 nailed together in a modernist random pattern. there was one that wedged and not nailed. if you managed to wiggle it out, it revealed a cassette tape perfected entombed inside for your listening pleasure.
another was a blob of that spraycan insulation goop that continues to expand until it hardens. it was painted dayglo pink. it was on top of a green cloth box-shaped pouch. it looked like an ice cream cone (the tape was in the pouch).
but my all time favorite was a shaped box of chicken wire with dirt inside about an inch deep. growing in that dirt was a fresh crop of beautiful green grass a couple of inches tall (the roots held the dirt in place).
at one end was a little tombstone with name, title and band info - and also a little miniature shovel. the idea was you had to literally disinter (dig up) the cassette to play it. back from the grave!
brilliant stuff with no budget. that's always been where it's at."

otm

that's great, a cut well above the most extreme CD packaging I've seen (e.g. Spiritualized's blister packs, Spectrum's oil pouch)

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0041297296_36.jpg

https://snooper7.bandcamp.com/merch/preorder-black-snpr-tech-cassette-player-recorder