Tapes Will Make You Fall In Love With Music Again

I’m not going to convince you that tapes are going to be a thing, not when the regular-people news outlets are still struggling with the re-emergence of vinyl. Tapes, in all probability, aren’t a thing now and won’t be even more of a thing in the future. Their sound quality is poor, their tracks can’t be skipped and even though producing them is cheap, especially compared to vinyl, uploading to iTunes and Bandcamp costs nothing and reaches a worldwide audience. However, here’s the simple fact about tapes: if you start buying them in addition to MP3s, vinyl records and CDs then you’ll hear music that you wouldn’t otherwise. You’ll be able to go deeper and weirder, especially into your local scene. And you can walk around with a fucking Walkman on. You can wear headphones that are a stainless steel semi-circle and two yellowing foam discs. People will look at you and think “there’s a guy who listens to cassette tapes” (the male pronoun is justified here since most women are smarter than this.)
When I say that they won’t become a thing, that doesn’t mean that their popularity is going to stay at the level it hit when Compact Discs supplanted them- their sales spiked by 74% in 2016, for a total of 129,000 sold. For the sake of comparison, 13.1 million vinyl albums were sold in the same year, so the next hippest format is over one-hundred times more popular. The seriously underground stuff isn’t likely to be recorded by Nielsen Soundscan, so the real numbers are likely to be higher. High enough to justify an investment in a means of playing tapes for any music fan looking to be seen as serious.
A cassette deck is easy to find. Amazon will sell you a full-size double tape deck for around $150, a Walkman-sized player for as little as $20. Mostly, these are designed to connect to your PC so you can back up your old mixtapes, but they’ll do fine for playing the anti-civilization crust-grind comp you got handed at a show, and you’ll even be able to dub your own tapes. You could start your own tape-only label! You, with your own record company kind of!

Okay, now that the normies have all gone to think about starting tape labels, let’s talk about the Real Shit: vintage tape decks. The Nakamichi 1000ZXL can be purchased for around $4000. It’s faceplate comes in gold. Probably not actual atomic-number 79, covalent radius 136±6 pm gold, but close. It can record infrasonic codes between songs so that it adjusts to the exact settings that sound best. It’s amazing and nobody is Baller enough to own one. If you don’t want to break four figures then there’s the Nakamichi MR-1, which is typically around $5–600 on eBay. It’s a rack-mounted, professional studio model, and just has the one tape deck, so you’ll need two if you want to make Dickbutt Stupid Tape Label a reality. Tascam’s 122 MkII is about the same price and quality, and it has some chunky knobs and dials for additional Pro.
If being able to make your own cassettes is something you want but your dungeon-synth collective aren’t fussy about sound quality, TEAC’s discontinued W-890RMKII will get you there, and it looks relatively normal. Or say you want portability- the Sony WM-D6C is the greatest portable tape player ever made. It packs two kinds of Dolby noise reduction and allows you to select settings for the type of tape you’re using. I didn’t even know that there were different types of cassette tapes- that’s how fucking Pro the WM-D6C is. It even comes in a leather holster. Like a gun. Alternatively, there’s the Marantz PMD430, a $300+ monster that’s as big as an Infinite Jest hardcover, probably heavier, and its fans are probably just as sufferable.
(You’ll need a good quality receiver and speakers to get the most out of a tape deck, whether it’s vintage or modern. I’m not going to get into pro-audio equipment- that way lies madness.)
Alternatively, L.A record label Burger Records is just about the only organization of any kind selling modern tape players that you’d actually want to be seen using. Their Burger Buddy both plays tapes and downloads them as MP3s, which seems to be a common feature in modern tape players. It also, crucially, looks good. Burger has been putting out some very good albums on tape for a while now- Adult Books’ Running From the Blows is good as hell, and they’ve even put out William Burroughs doing riffs from Naked Lunch. Legit. Their sub-label Weiner Records allows anybody with $275 to get a hundred tapes of their music, comedy or spoken word, so it makes sense for them to get into hardware as well as software.
(Urban Outfitters also has a line of personal cassette players and a boombox, but… no.)

Okay, so you’ve got the tape deck down, so let’s start building your collection. I know you know to hit up second-hand record stores to get all of your pre-1995 favorite albums with some hiss and tracks you can’t skip, and you’ll probably find a small but highly concentrated tape section in your local independent record store. There’s also Burger Records, of course, who are linked in that everybody-plays-with-everybody indie scene way with Gnar Tapes, formed by members of party-rockers White Fang and home to lo-fi folks like Free Weed and multimedia weirdos like Jib Kidder. These are people who are significantly cooler than you. Or say you’re not cool, at all, and you want to go deep into industrial techno and power electronics: Dominick Fernow of Prurient, Vatican Shadow and so, so many other projects runs Hospital Productions, which is as deep into tapes as the far-underground noise scene from which it draws most of its roster. Hospital puts out a lot, but not all, of Fernow’s own work alongside other, let’s say, ‘difficult’ acts like Dust Belt and Laureate, plus tape versions of albums by acts like early computer-noise pioneers Flutter and French blackened-death act Christicide. Godless America of Orlando, Florida are an altogether breezier affair, mostly dealing in garage rock and pop-punk- and I like their policy of pricing everything at $4.20 or $6.66.
Okay, that’s one more reason to get into tapes: they’re cheap. Unless you’re buying the big releases from major labels you’re unlikely to go far over five dollars for an EP or ten for an album. Now, think of how many times in your life you’ve spotted a friend five bucks for a beer when they left their wallet at home, or waved away a crumpled bill when they tried to pay for their half of a Starbucks order. Probably a lot, right? With a single-figure price point you’re not going to get all precious about loaning, trading or just plain giving your tapes away. That’s how friendships get formed and new music gets heard, and it just doesn’t work with MP3s or even vinyl. In a musical ecosystem where there are just too many fucking bands, most of whom are awful, cassette tapes allow you to experience music the way people used to: passing discoveries between friends, finding one album to listen to for the next week instead of having fifty Bandcamp tabs open and nothing playing, digging in darkened corners of record stores for something rare and weird that might turn out to be the next Velvet Underground. It’s a way of consuming music that’s difficult, time-consuming and, for a certain type of person, worth it.
