That story I’ve linked there that just went up earlier today from LA Weekly music editor Randall Roberts doesn’t contain the phrase, but if you do a quick Google search on it you’ll find that there are a few entries for it already out there, mostly from last year (here’s a blog entry from Hydra Head from last summer). Randall’s linked to a prediction from three years back that pretty much called it — the first slight inkling I had was when Foxglove/Digitalis switched its limited release emphasis from CDR to cassettes a couple of years back.  I knew things were about to go overground a bit when Hometapes sent around a year-end promo sampler on cassette in December. while just today over at Arthur Byron Coley and Thurston Moore, by way of arguing the opposite, said it was “beyond the point of convincing anyone that some of the best music/sounds is happening on small cassette labels.” Get ready for a trend, again.

Why?  The three year old piece I linked mentions a general cultural/pricing sense, but today an ILM thread broke out on the very subject and provided some more concrete thoughts from people actually releasing such work.  One poster argued:

This might be a “no shit” statement but I think a lot of current cassette culture is a response to the Internet making it easier for bands to distribute their music around the world without being on a label. The whole indie/punk aesthetic was built on this concept of the struggle of being underground; now that there isn’t really an underground anymore, bands have to intentionally handicap themselves, work to make themselves obscure and hidden, to be part of this idea. In addition, from my personal experience, part of playing music are the competing urges to want to be more popular and also to want to be more private/hidden. I can see how releasing music on cassette in the 2000s is attractive in the sense of making yourself deliberately obscure.

In response, another said:

i pretty much disagree with this. if anything releasing cassettes is a way to revive the value of physicality in a time when bands are often nothing more than an mp3 and a couple jpegs on someone’s ipod; some will upload a cassette to their ipods, but i think the point isn’t that they want to be obscured but they want to make something people actually want to have. obv people itt aren’t interested in owning cassettes, but i don’t know, a lot of other people are. i’ve got a friend who runs a cassette label, and he sells out every release of usually 100-200 within a month or two. i think itunes is fucking stupid, and although i spend most of my music allocated money on vinyl, i buy cassettes pretty often. my band couldn’t afford to make a record so we made a tape, it was really cheap and it sounds pretty good.

But as the two posters agreed in a further follow-up exchange, all these reasons can apply rather than being mutually exclusive.  Other ideas that had been rummaging around my head before reviewing all of today’s links (so forgive the repeated sentiments) included the less-obvious way that cassettes could be ripped (but not completely less-obvious — otherwise Ion wouldn’t be selling this), the perceived ‘junkiness’ of the format as its own attraction, and the idea that something handcrafted could be applied to what seems like the least handcrafty of products. I really don’t have a general romance attached to mixtapes as they were, but a couple I received stand out in my mind for how not merely the cassette itself but the J-card and even the case would be decorated or enhanced.

I’d been doing some thinking about all this in recent months as I’d gone ahead and jury-rigged a connection between my old tape deck and my computer to dump a slew of old interviews I’d recorded into digital format.  I decided to go ahead and do something similar with the very random collection of cassettes I had around and I freely admit to rediscovering — and newly appreciating — a lot of music that had been released on any number of cassette-only or cassette-friendly labels (Unread and Best Kept Secret being just two of many examples) and via bands on their own about a decade back, chugging away well under any sort of radar.  The work of Luv(sic) in particular has been lovely to hear once again, but that scrapes the surface. I’d also wondered if the work of folks like Messthetics, especially via the Messthetics’ Greatest Hiss comp, and Mutant Sounds, which has featured god knows how many obscure early eighties tape releases over time, had played a further part in calling people’s attention to the form in a new way.

Much more can be said about this, but don’t be surprised to see a lot more talk and attention now being paid to the format — and to see that phrase a lot more.  I was going to end with a recommendation to check out Sunset’s Eternally Dead, but I see that it’s sold out — thus perhaps raising the questions as noted via the ILM thread about access and obscurity and economy.  But they’re good questions to ask.

— Ned R.