Blank Tape: Electronic Cassette Culture – Experimental Electronic Music Has Found a New Home on Cassette

via CDM

So, you get Sacred Tapes, Tesla Tapes, Astro:Dynamics, Bleep, and artists Helm and Ekoplekz (on PAN and Planet Mu.) It’s all heavy hitters of the underground scene in the UK. Unfortunately, it’s also all white and UK-based. It occurs to me that the economy of the cassette worldwide could make it an international medium. I found my own cassette collection was as likely to come from friends shopping India or Indonesia as Europe or the US. And that need not be traditional music, either – my experience is that the growing interest in raunchy low-fi is one that extends well beyond the Western world. There’s something, I suspect, waiting to happen here. Shipping or trading tapes across continents could let makers of weirdo dark music connect.

But one thing you shouldn’t do is scoff. We live in the era of all of the above – 192kHz, 64-bit and multichannel surround against mono 1-bit circuits and tapes and distortion and everything in between. Freed from the notion that we have to progress from A to B, we can enjoy all of it. And that seems a good thing.

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