Tapes ’n’ Tapes What The A.V. Club learned doing Tapes 'n' Tapes

A little more than a year ago, The A.V. Club launched a video series about local cassette labels called “Tapes ’n’ Tapes” with a basic, rather ambitious goal in mind: to capture the complexities of a mostly DIY musical community and its chosen medium for self-expression. There have been plenty of trend stories on the resurgence of tape culture in the past few years, a trend in and of itself since more and more well known musicians have decided to release music on what’s still widely perceived as an obsolete format. While touring with TV On The Radio in the summer of 2009, Dirty Projectors sold advanced copies of their breakthrough album, Bitte Orca, on cassette; in 2010, Minneapolis indie rock band Tapes ’N Tapes (the namesake of our video series) hosted a contest where fans could win a handmade cassette of their third album, Outside; this year, Dinosaur Jr. reissued its first three albums on cassette and packaged them as an exclusive box set, which sold out online in less than a week; and all along the way, everyone from Cass McCombs to Of Montreal have released albums on the magnetic-tape-in-a-compact-plastic-shell format known as the cassette.

It’s certainly a fascinating movement happening in the national music scene—or at least the independent one. Unfortunately, the coverage of the new cassette culture hasn’t evolved much beyond the basic “check out this neat thing” story line, which is actually the thesis of a short Wired piece that came out in June: “Cassettes are about to be cool again.” Sure it’s cool, but isn’t there something more than just the chic affectations or nostalgia driving people to produce music on cassettes? There must be more fueling folks to spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours folding j-cards or dubbing cassettes, right?

Well, yes. The A.V. Club learned a lot about cassette culture over the course of 23 interviews with label heads from around Chicago. From Neon Blossom Records to Kid Sister Everything, each honcho had a variety of reasons for why he or she releases music on tape. Permanent Records co-owner Lance Barresi’s induction into releasing tapes came out of necessity: The label was re-issuing Second Verses, an album by St. Louis noise-punk act Drunks With Guns, and that’s the only format singer Mike Doskocil would sign off on. Prior to starting Notice Recordings, Travis Bird and Evan Lindorff-Ellery began using tapes to record their practices using a large supply of religious cassettes that Lindorff-Ellery had bought at Village Discount. For Eric Hanss, the format offers a great physical reflection and representation of the mostly synth-based material he releases on Field Studies.

Of course, there’s plenty of common ground between the diverse pool of labels. For the locals who spend hours dubbing cassettes with a collection of daisy-chained tape-decks or get their batches duplicated at a professional wholesaler, the format occupies a strange cross-section that covers practicality, art, commerce, and simply the effort to document something.

Yes, plenty of label heads prefer the cassette because it’s cheap, but its practicality also extends to the format’s durability and versatility. It’s easy to record onto tapes, the plastic shells make for a canvas for visual artists, and it’s the one physical musical format that’s at the apex of DIY creativity due to the ease and financial flexibility it offers users. And because cassettes are so inexpensive, they invite a certain amount of experimentation on the part of creators and listeners: Musicians and label heads can release music they like on a whim without having to worry about breaking the bank on vinyl, and intrepid listeners can try out a new tape by an up-and-coming musician or subversive noise artist for a few bucks. It also helps foster a greater sense of community, with people eagerly trading tapes with other listeners. “I kind of like that, I kind of like that it’s so low-cost you can just be like, ‘oh take it, check it out,’” Priority Male Tapes’ Matthew Hord said last November.

The key element tying everything together is that physical rectangular shell. The word “tangible” came up frequently throughout the series, and indeed it’s as much a major factor driving cassette culture as vinyl culture. The difference between those two cultures is accessibility. Just as cassettes were a democratizing medium in the ’80s, when anyone could record just about anything without much of a budget, they remain a democratizing medium in today’s music scene. Any intrepid musician can record their project and pass it along to others with ease, regardless of musical taste. They get an end product that represents all their hard work, labor, and creative ideals that they can hold in their hands, a document of the existence of that brief moment of sound.

That’s an important factor: There are plenty of often unpredictable outside forces bearing down on the musically inclined, be it the dilution of music listening in the digital age or simply the economic environment, but releasing music on cassettes gives people a creative outlet to produce whatever they want and the ability to do it with complete creative control. Releasing music on cassette isn’t exactly a new phenomenon—plenty of noise acts have done it since before it went out of style—and while the many pieces about tape labels imply that the resurgence is nothing more than a fad, the motivating factors behind today’s tape labels are anything but a trend.