The Brooklyn Rail

The cassette tape is the audio equivalent of the AK-47: cheap and easy to mass manufacture; highly usable with the minimum of skills and experience; and a symbol and tool of revolutions.

Marc Masters doesn’t use that metaphor in his excellent and truly exciting book on cassette tapes, but he doesn’t have to. He outlines the story of how the cassette came to be the dominant recording medium on a global scale during the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, and by doing so shows how essential cassettes were to so many musical movements that they would have been impossible without the tapes that, as he points out, are so easy and satisfying to hold in your hand.

That’s the most important part of the cassette, its size and therefore not only its portability but that of its accompanying recording and playback devices (and their low cost). Invented by Phillips engineer Lou Ottens in the early 1960s, the cassette was the everyman medium—anyone with a blank tape (or a prerecorded tape they could record over) and a basic recorder with a built-in condenser mic could record, well, anything: their own voice, audio off the radio or television, even their band playing, like Dinosaur Jr. Omar Souleyman was a local Syrian wedding singer, captured on hundreds of impromptu, live cassette recordings that were later found by Mark Gergis (one of the several obsessive tape collectors Masters profiles), and now he’s a global star.

Small, light, cheap, easy to produce and reproduce, mail swap groups sprang up around cassettes, with people placing ads in magazines, swapping and selling their own handmade compilations, focussed on their curiosity, taste, and local scenes. These were collectors who wanted to share what they loved, and formed underground communities that, in the West, helped make the careers of so many punk bands and outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston viable, and also opened up a window to the incredible variety of musical styles around the world.

Collectors like Brian Shimkovitz explored cassettes being produced on the ground in places like West Africa, eventually bringing back so much music that they created record labels, like Shimkovitz’s Awesome Tapes from Africa. Meanwhile, in Africa, India, and elsewhere, the cassette was the vehicle for local musicians to share what they were doing, hear traditional music, and also find out—via bootlegs—what was happening in the West. The result was hybrid styles that were a fusion of Indigenous music and modern rock and pop, like dabke in Syria and chicha in the Andes, which Masters describes as “traditional huayno music” fused to “Western surf and psychedelic rock.”

This was musical independence and freedom to the absolute nth degree, the makers owning the tools of recording and reproduction. This, naturally, led to the record companies panicking over consumers taping albums—there was a whole “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign—and political repression in places like Egypt, where there was a dedicated police force trying to stamp out bootleg cassettes.

Masters also covers the live taping culture that grew up around the Grateful Dead and developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the band, and of course the mixtape, a right of passage for the formation of one’s personality that just cannot be replaced by a streaming playlist. Yes, one can agonize over the order of the songs, but that’s nothing like calculating the times for each track and figuring out how many can fit on the side of a cassette—and also, who gets the Maxell XL-II copy (not to mention that making a mixtape is a real-time endeavor).

One story about one cassette distills the entire cultural apparatus that connects how this modest mass consumer audio technology was the foundation for the wondrous variety of niche music and musical cultures. A fellow named Jed Bindeman caught the fever when he was a teenager, gathering cassettes by mail at the tail end of the great swapping era. Masters describes how he moved on to vinyl collecting, but never found it as exciting or satisfying as cassettes. Bindeman tells him that, “with tapes, it’s still like the Wild West out there, filled with cassettes that came out in editions of fifty in 1982 or something like that. If you find one of these, it might be the only copy that exists. It’s exciting to hold that artifact and think, ‘Wow, if I wasn’t listening to this thing right now, chances are this would never be heard again!’”

Bindeman searches record stores and thrift shops for tapes, contacts musicians who produced small-batch releases, and has been documenting this through his Concentric Circles account on Instagram and re-releasing recordings on his Concentric Circles label on Bandcamp. He looks for not just independently produced recordings, but handmade ones as well, ones that Masters notes show a “vivid sense of how many people have found the cassette tape format perfectly suited to artistic self-expression.” Bindeman’s ultimate find came out of a stack of handmade tapes his girlfriend brought home from a Goodwill store in Portland, Oregon. In that was the tape that inspired his label, a set of evocative songs for a solo vocalist and synthesizers that had a gothic/Siouxsie and the Banshees/Cocteau Twins quality.

This was literally homemade and handmade, and only had a defunct phone number and the name “Carola” on it. Searching social media, he eventually discovered this was Carola Baer, a teacher living in England who had recorded the tape by herself when she was living in San Francisco in the early ’90s—and it was the only copy she ever made. Now it’s The Story of Valerie, on Concentric Circles, a single cassette, once forgotten, now available for anyone to hear.

But this is all old analog culture now. Tapes have had a modest comeback but there’s little of the primitive aura around them anymore, and blogs and Bandcamp mean no more zines, no more tiny ads in the back for people looking to copy and swap tapes—the underground is everywhere on the web in the twenty-first century. While the vast accessibility is a good thing, that has mostly swamped the craziest, most personal, and most exhilarating niches. The upside is it’s easy to hear Daniel Johnston or Omar Souleyman, the downside is, where is the next Carola Baer?