Do you reckon tapes will ever have resurgence or are they totally dead?

i really should start making mixtapes again! i need a cassette deck first augh

Cassettes are the worst place to display artwork.

cd jewel cases are equally as ugly, imo. which is why i prefer handmade artwork.

I always used to be intrigued as to how album artwork would be adapted to the cassette inlay format. Thinking pre-CD, you'd have front and back cover and (later on) printed inner sleeves. That must've been a right challenge from a designer's perspective back in the day. Some inlays would seem to unfold over and over like a roll of Andrex.

And on a vaguely related note, this was always my favouriite cassette album. Factory did a whole slew of releases like this, but none of them had the panache of Low-life. Photo inserts, extra tracks, the works. Wazzes over your latter-day deluxe CD reissues.

  On 7/5/2011 at 4:34 AM, SPD² said:

Cassettes are the worst place to display artwork.

better than a cd anyway...

  On 7/5/2011 at 1:35 AM, vamos scorcho said:

cassettes represent the underground

agreed - the most exciting music i've been listening / buying for last eight years has been released on tape..

anyway, i reckon the whole tape labels thing is gettin' out of control - too many labels / releases to follow

it's just ridiculous but on the other hand, as Parris Mitchell sang: "the underground never stops"...

  On 7/4/2011 at 3:20 PM, SPD² said:

  On 7/4/2011 at 10:01 AM, kokoon said:

lol why u mad

 

Because man, I don't want to get into an artist only to find out that I'll never be able to get all of their stuff because their first 12 releases were bunch of crappy fucking tapes that there were only 25 of ever made. Rather I'll just move onto an artist that puts out real releases or provides d/ls.

 

...and I'm a cranky angry old man.

I rather have a physical release (ie. a tape) that a bunch of smoke in the air (D/l s).

Anyway, why you complain ?? You can download pretty much of all those tape releases either from blogs or slsk.

Plus the tape label thing has gotten so big many of them do like 100+ copies of each release this days...

  On 7/4/2011 at 3:20 PM, SPD² said:

  On 7/4/2011 at 10:01 AM, kokoon said:

lol why u mad

 

Because man, I don't want to get into an artist only to find out that I'll never be able to get all of their stuff because their first 12 releases were bunch of crappy fucking tapes that there were only 25 of ever made. Rather I'll just move onto an artist that puts out real releases or provides d/ls.

 

...and I'm a cranky angry old man.

What is a "real release" anyway ?? Some d/l from a crappy netlabel ??

As i said, i rather stick to something physical (like a tape). Some of this tapes are little works of art themselves (you can tell a lot of work / love went on to making them).

Anyway, this tape stuff is not as limited / difficult to get as it might seem - even the most obscure releases surface quite often on Discogs and eBay at fairly decent prices (the only exception to this is maybe artist who made it big like Emeralds or OPN).

Also, as said before, runs are getting higher - many tape labels do 100+ copies of each release nowadays.

.

.

I can do without tapes and have for about 15 years now. I don't get fake nostalgia. Nostalgia has become more of a trend than anything.

lol @ candiru

such a world class curmudgeon at such a young age

  On 7/16/2011 at 4:50 PM, Candiru said:

I can do without tapes and have for about 15 years now. I don't get fake nostalgia. Nostalgia has become more of a trend than anything.

amen. gives me some faith that there are people w/ a little good sense out there still. I know we're in the minority.

Eh brother i know you just joined the site to sell the musique concrète collection you wasted your life putting together, only to find out that you didn't really like most of it, but i don't quite know where you get off saying this:

  On 7/16/2011 at 2:32 PM, WOIAJO said:

  On 7/5/2011 at 4:34 AM, SPD² said:

Cassettes are the worst place to display artwork.

 

better than a cd anyway...

seriously how so? LP is square: CD is square. it's just smaller. cassette aspect ratio is a monkey wrench in the system.

I'm not sure I'll be back to this thread to check your reply but i suppose you can give it a shot just in case i do.

well on the plus i finally got around to replacing a belt on an akai gxc-75d that i basically got for free (was DOA due to shipping). listening to spirit of eden as i type. still waiting on my copy of ceeland..

  On 7/17/2011 at 5:11 AM, SPD² said:

  On 7/16/2011 at 4:50 PM, Candiru said:

I can do without tapes and have for about 15 years now. I don't get fake nostalgia. Nostalgia has become more of a trend than anything.

 

amen. gives me some faith that there are people w/ a little good sense out there still. I know we're in the minority.

I'm with you - I had a walkman in highschool, and while i enjoyed many a tape on it (especially "paul's boutique" and later "ten") i would never trade my iPod touch for a walkman.

Getting high and trying to unravel tapes that had been caught on the spindle was a fucking nightmare, and shitty sound was never enjoyable.

Fake and trendy nostalgia has to be a young person's thing.

my first tapes were Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, Weird Al and MC Hammer, but...

Yeah the only explanation for this has to be an age bracket thing. If you were born in like the mid to late 80's and CDs had taken over before you were like between 5 and 8, I could understand how it'd be genuine nostalgia. Tapes were still happening into the early 90's so those of us that are like early 30s have a clear memory of how much more awesome it was to be able to burn a CDr then to mess w/ some clunky ass tape you had to rewind and all that shit. Vinyl on the other hand was our nostalgia but it was never truly obsolete, so to have a real obsolete format like cassette come back it just seems pointless to us.

That being said, I'm putting my first EP out on CED.

  On 7/16/2011 at 7:05 PM, luke viia said:

lol @ candiru

 

such a world class curmudgeon at such a young age

Huh? I meant to say that I haven't used tapes in 15 years, not that I'm 15 years old.

But seriously. Tapes. Fuck 'em.

Yeah, I haven't used tape in ages either. My only stereo that's capable of playing tapes feel off the shelf in the garage (the whole shelf tore away from the wall lol) and that busted the front doors off the tape players. It might still work, but I don't have shit on tape. My first memories of tape are of me and my brother carrying around our brown Fisher Price tape recorder and recording sounds and stuff.

Then one time we sat in our room and recorded ourselves cursing, saying things like "ass, fuck, shit" etc lol. I was probably like 6... Any way we recorded that and then we got caught listening to it later and got in trouble

I remember in late elementary school recording things off the radio, totally main-stream pop stuff like Boys 2 Men and stuff lol. DOing stuff like touching the tape so it would run slow and just listening to the "weird sounds". My first tape was Garth Brooks, I had a lot of country music on tape. I also remember when I got the Kriss Kross tape... Jump around :sup: One christmas my brother gave me his MC Hammer Adams Family tape because he knew I liked it and I was really surprised he gave it to me!

Once I got a CD player I never looked back though....

Spotify playlists make me nostalgic for tapes because they are completely different while being the same thing. Theres none of the personal touch, you don't even need to own any of the songs or really have even heard them. I can make a convincing compilation of anything on Spotify and not even have to have listened to any of the songs before.

I used tapes up until iPod Nanos came out in about 2006, I had one of those miniCD players for a few years though but I could never get involved in CD walkmans, too big and jumpy. I used to fill up the ends of tapes with recordings of John Peel talking which I would painstakingly try to edit so he said funnier things, although a lot of the artist names/song titles etc he read out were already funny and even more so if you looped them for 2 minutes. I've still got the huuuuge walkman my dad had when I was very small, and it still works.

I'm interested in cassette releases if they are done analog all the way through. I'm not down with simply recording waves off a computer to cassette. However, if someone takes the time to record to cassette four-track and then mixdown to cassette and dub from there, I think there is a special magic if only for the effort that went into the whole ordeal.

I'm not a fan of all the cassette labels around at the moment. Too many releases from too many artists because every release is a super limited edition of between 5 and 30. A lot of good drone artists about at the moment but many of them release about 10 tapes a year... I can't keep up. Slow your roll, dude.

I was born in the 70s, and so I was listening to music for a long time before the miracle of the CD appeared. It used to be an OCD format trade-off for me, between tape hiss and vinyl crackle and pop that I used to hate with a vengeance. Plus the mixtape was of course the precursor to the playlist, and I've always been addicted to making those in whatever medium. So tapes are not just a novelty to me, I used to use them extensively to feed my music addiction and they still mean a lot to me (plus I'm an old cunt and prone to unhealthy bouts of nostalgia, all about my being a geek and nowt to do with trying vainly to be cool or trendy). But use a cassette Walkman today instead of my iPod? Fuck that.

  On 7/18/2011 at 8:14 PM, Caretstik said:

But use a cassette Walkman today instead of my iPod? Fuck that.

lol I actually did that last Friday because both my mp3 players were broken

DMX Krew has just released a cassette only album, fyi