Over at Chain of Knives, Ned Raggett has a good piece up responding to the rise of cassette labels. The comments are worth a read; Lucas Jensen makes the definitely-valid point that, well, cassettes are not the friendliest of formats. Which is something I agree with: I can make a case for the advantages of vinyl, CDs, and digital formats, and own music on all three formats. It’s harder for me to think of a particular style of music that’s ideally suited for the cassette — though I don’t doubt that one exists.
Me @ Volume 1- A Quick Technical Note for the Weekend
- Afternoon Bites: Stephen Fry, Geoff Dyer on criticism, the Month of Letters challenge, and more
- The Week In Reviews: Jay-Z at Carnegie Hall, the journalism of Charles Dickens, Edward St Aubyn’s prose, and more
- Afternoon Bites: Hanksy Speaks! Chabon on comics! Straub on Walhberg! and more.
- Coming Soon to a Lower East Side Near You*
Thanks for the hat tip and link — yeah, I don’t think it’s a matter of a kind of style of music suited for cassettes per se, but at the same time there’s been a general gravitation over time, if one wants to lump together post-punk/modern psych/noise. And even then, this is arguably a mostly European/North American perception; as has been noted many times, cassettes have remained a standard format for many other musics/societies around the world. Think of all the blogs dedicated to African music that take their selections from tapes — closer to home for me, *any* number of Mexican and Mexican-American musics were for the longest time available predominantly on tape. So perception/location is a key factor here.