Cassettes

I’ve been thinking about the humble cassette these past few days, almost pulling the trigger on Machinefabriek's cassette-only Sahara Mixtape album over the weekend, before halting the Paypal payment at the final screen. It's strange to see cassettes making a comeback, the underground/experimental music community in particular has re-embraced this old format in search of a warmer analogue sound (or perhaps anti-digital), but I remain unconvinced that they are nothing other than a cool retro novelty. I have an old Philips 3-in-1 unit to play tapes on, but I find it a cumbersome format - the sheer work involved in finding a favorite track, the endless fast-forwarding and rewinding, a nuisance compared with the needle-dropping precision of an LP or the laser-guided index of a CD. I had a pretty decent tape collection back in the early 90’s, mostly death metal cassettes that were picked up for swaps, or bought when an LP or CD edition wasn’t available, such as Soft White Underbelly, the sole studio album by Sweet Tooth, a fantastic, raucous power trio Justin Broadrick played in around the time of Streetcleaner. Earache issued the album in 1990 on vinyl and cassette (no CD) on their short-lived, one-release imprint Staindrop Records, and given Digby Pearson’s antipathy for re-issuing old Earache albums, I regret now that my tape is long gone.

Good things come in small packages as the proverb goes and I can't ignore the fact that an awful lot of very good music is getting released on cassette only, and some of it looks rather lovely too, with designers taking a very imaginative approach to the limited space of the inlay card. Back in 2016, I actually did buy some music on cassette. Steve Thrower's dark ambient project UnicaZürn, released a cassette-only album entitled Omegapavilion, on the Tapeworm label and while I was a fan of UnicaZürn's 2009 album, the brilliant Temporal Bends, I think it was Danielle Dax's gorgeous artwork that finally pushed me into buying the album, the first cassette I had bought in over 25 years. When this little package first popped through my letterbox I spent days fondling the case like it was some strange fetishistic object, which of course it was - the tape now sits on the CD shelf and gets little play these days for fear that my Philips will mangle the tape ribbon. I just wish the two fantastic sides of Zeit-style cosmic weirdness were instead on a shiny compact disc, or made available as a download. I might still buy the Machinefabriek tape, but I know the digital file offered would most likely end up as the primary listening format and the cassette displayed as a sort of trophy add-on.