Grab Your Pitch Forks and Favorite Cassette Players; It’s a Revolution!
Well ……… okay it may be far from a radical revolution, but there does appear to be some sort of retro-movement going on: Are cassettes making a come-back? You may want to dust of your cassette players because just as there was a revitalization in the demand for vinyl records, for some people there is something quite satisfying about the good old fashioned cassette.
Trendsetters or Merely Dilusional
At the recent South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival held in Austin, Texas, rising Indy act Free Energy distributed their music on cassettes. As the lead singer Nick Shuminsky put it , “The only people who listen to CDs now are old people and people who sold their vinyl collection and bought CDs and now are stuck with them. Most bands that tour have (expletive) vans that still have tape players, and the idea is that at the very least our friends in bands can listen to our record while they’re touring.” Music fans the world over can celebrate that Nick must have abandoned a lucrative career in aerospace engineering to follow his dream of becoming an Indie music star.
Big Names Jumping on the Band-wagon?
It is interesting to note that Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth have recently released music on cassette as well.
Moves like this might possibly indicate a trend that could really heat up. Cassettes and cassette players certainly lack the convenience and compactness of MP3’s and iPods, but for certain music fans that actually holds the allure . (However, older readers who have lived long enough to remember having more than a few of their favorite albums “eaten” by their cassette players may wonder at the attraction. Perhaps it is just another case of “living life on the edge”; any moment now my irreplaceable live bootleg cassette can end up becoming a snack for my aging cassette player – what a rush!)
The Allure of DIY
At KVRX Studios on the University of Texas campus, Brad Barry hosts c60 which is a radio program devoted to music on cassettes. Barry feels the, “. . . do-it-yourself element is part of what draws people to the world of cassettes. There is a sense of nostalgia. Punk bands and DIY stuff in the 80s was on cassette, so you kind of want to connect with that lineage it’s a history that’s both personal and musical.”
Natrix Natrix Records, one of a fistful of small record labels in Austin that releases music on cassette and vinyl exclusively , is ran by Seth Whaland. Whaland grew up in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, an area apparently “known for a tradition of DIY punk and hardcore bands that record on cassette”. “The hands-on aspect of tape is a big part of the appeal, he said. I press record on each side there’s actually work that goes into it for me. I love vinyl, but I don’t have anything to do with the pressing of it.” Another refugee from a grinding career in rocket science? Perhaps an ex-neurosurgeon ? One has to wonder: Does he “hand-forge” the cassettes he records on?
Ernest Greene whose stage name is Washed Out — perhaps referencing his flight from a stressful career in actuarial statistics? — also releases his music on cassette. His thoughts on the subject: “It’s pretty great to be able to control every step of the production like designing the art, printing the labels, dubbing the cassettes. It makes for a much more personal experience. The only way to get one is through me or my website, so it’s a pretty simple process, and I think people really enjoy that.” What could be possibly stopping him from simply creating art and labels for his own personally “burnt” CD’s that would only be available through him personally or his website we can’t imagine , but it appears that process isn’t nearly as satisfying as dubbing cassettes
Okay, all kidding aside, there clearly is a retro-movement out there for cassettes that appears to be driven primarily by low-tech “indie” acts and their rabid followers .
Yeah But . . . Can You Even Get Cassette Players Anymore?
Contrary to what popular perception may be, there are still plenty of models of personal cassette players and recorders (cassette Walkman) , cassette boomboxes and auto cassette players from Sony, Panasonic, Kenwood, Pioneer and other top brands available for purchase as well as cassette players reviews online.
And For the Rest of Us . . . .
For those less gaga with the “retro low-tech” aspect of cassettes, you can find several simple, detailed “how to’s” about preserving your decomposing cassette music collection just by doing a Google search for “How to digitise your cassettes”