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| Tijuana Panthers' Half Baked cassette by Kill/Hurt |
"I grew up collecting and listening to cassette tapes and records, because that's the format that was around," said Phil Shaheen, drummer for Tijuana Panthers. "I like the fact that cassettes are in again and that there are cool little labels putting them out."
It’s true—cassettes seem a little ridiculous at first. They’re bulky, they require listeners to flip them in the middle of a track, and cassette players are no longer widely available. But in contrast with the easy accessibility of digital media, the intimate quality of the cassette outweighs its limitations. An increase of cassette record labels in Southern California and mixtape enthusiasm in the Bay Area and up the West Coast signal the medium's renewed relevance.
Cassettes attract small indie bands with their cheap price. For 70 cents a tape, an artist can get small batches of music in the public's hands for less than on CDs or vinyl. Michael McKinney, president of M2 Communications, a Pasadena-based duplication company, reports his cassette output to be between 6,000 and 10,000 tapes each month. "Tape orders have definitely picked up from almost nothing in the last couple years, and it's been almost entirely indie bands," McKinney told the Los Angeles Times.
Several record producers in Los Angeles provide cassette releases to interested bands. Chris Jahnle and his girlfriend Kat Bouza, founders of Hollywood's label Kill/Hurt, started the company dubbing small batches of noise-rock cassettes with giant grey duplicators purchased for $200 from eBay. Cassettes naturally have hiss, treble, and distortion—qualities that go along with the mood of garage, punk and other noisy genres, said Bouza.
Not Not Fun, an Eagle Rock-based label founded by Britt Brown and his wife, Amanda Brown, specializes in cassette releases for noisy rock bands. They both loved cassettes since high school, so when they started the label it was never a question whether or not they would produce cassettes, said Britt Brown. The label completes about 20 cassette releases a year, charging the band $1,500 for 500 copies. Because Not Not Fun gives 20 percent of profits back to the band and doesn't require a contract, the Browns haven't had trouble attracting clients since the company started in 2003.
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| Mark "Frosty" McNeill by dublabrat on Flickr |
On the second Friday of each month, Dublab hosts Top Tape, a DJ night at Silverlake's Hyperion Tavern. The event features a tag-team rotation of tape-only DJs and the magnetic, low-fidelity sounds of cassette tapes. About 20 DJs show up each month, with enough time to spin three tapes each. "We had to go from five to three since a lot more DJs have been showing up," said McNeill of the event's growing popularity. DJs play anything from "brand new music straight out of the studio that they dub on a tape and bring down, to old cassettes they find in thrift stores," said McNeill. "A lot of the DJs that come down are buying cassettes for the purpose of bringing them down and playing them at Top Tape for an audience." The event, he said, "perpetuates a community that gets excited about it."
McNeill feels the medium brings a sense of community among those enthusiastic enough to dig through resale shops and garage sales to find unique tapes and sounds to remix. "For someone who's on the hunt for exciting music, it's really interesting because when you're out there at a thrift store going through a pile of cassettes, you're going to find some home recording tapes—you find mind blowing stuff on straight-to-tape demos. It's a one-off private glimpse into a moment . . . it could be anything," said McNeill. "The search and the exploration can pay off in a big way."
Walking past a Thai video store, McNeill spotted a stack of cassettes on the counter. Checking them out, he found they were talks on Buddhism in Thai. "I was hoping they would be music, but I'm going to record a Thai vinyl set straight onto the cassette," he said. McNeill has also played a set on Dublab with cassettes he scavenged from an Ethiopian market and created a DJ mix from tapes he bought on a trip to Cambodia. "It's not meant to be a gimmick, but it's a tool to exploring music that doesn't exist in other forms," said McNeill. "There's certain music that lends itself to cassette, whether because of economic reasons or because that's what was available."
The members of the San Francisco Mixtape Society understand the community and handcrafted feeling of exchanging mixtapes. Every month, members transform The Make-Out Room, a bar in the Mission District, into a venue for exchanging mixes. "Basically it's like a secret Santa party but with mixtapes," said Annie Lin, the society's co-founder. Each member brings his own mix to trade, leaving with a new set of tracks.
Although the club accepts submissions on CDs and USB drives as well, "you get a free beer if you bring cassette tapes," said Lin. The society will present a panel on the art of mixtapes at SXSW, a major music and technology festival in Austin, Texas in March 2012. "I think in the current digital age," said Lin, "people have a craving to get back to other people through music." With a mixtape, "it is one person who made it just for them, as opposed to throwing up a playlist on a music blog where millions of people can view it."
In late October, the indie band Wilco announced the release of its new album, The Whole Love, in a limited-edition cassette on its own label, dBpm Records. Cassettes make economic sense for bands releasing an album in a few hundred copies, but the release by Wilco, a band with two Grammy awards, points to the format attracting artists for reasons other than cost. "I think it's because of the fact that they want to see and experiment with the whole medium," said Lin of the release. "The value in CDs has really gone down over the years, and there is a huge resurgence of alternate media, like vinyl for example. I think going to cassette is just an experiment with that." A cassette tape can create a more personal attachment to the music because it can’t easily be dumped into an MP3 player and the listener can’t skip around to different tracks. The album becomes a cohesive unit.
"There's also something very interactive and fun about a tape," said Matt Carr, founder of the music blog Everybody Taste and Washington, D.C. record label Analog Edition. "You can literally see the magnetic tape travel around the spool, and when it gets stuck, you can fix it with a pencil," said Carr. "It's very analog, and now that the digital world has been conquered by the MP3…I think there's a lot of room in the world of music for physical, creative, and DIY forms of art." That return to do-it-yourself intimacy in spite of the digital era explains a famous band like Wilco’s choice to release a limited edition cassette.
The surge of cassette use by DJs, by bands and for individual mixtapes is an experiment reinventing an old medium for today's music scene. As technology continues to change the way we share music, making digital recording increasingly impersonal, musical counterculture will return to media of the past. Who knows, in the future CDs could provide the same comfort and nostalgia cassettes do today. It's a strange thought, but the return to cassettes also sounded a little ridiculous at first.
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