Record Store Day is great. I love records! They’re warm and beautiful and have giant sleeves for awesome art and you can do colored vinyl and weird inserts and cool fold-ins and I love every crackle and pop and they’re just really goddamn magical, okay?!?
However... records are also delicate, cumbersome to transport on tour, and expensive. Tapes are the true format of the proletariat musician! You have a physical product that’s cheap as hell, sounds pretty good and has a lot of cool potential for inserts and packaging. For punks especially, cassettes never really went away. So I for one am thrilled about the announcement of National Cassette Store Day, September 7th.
No longer the inadequate, younger sibling of Vinyl and CD, the humble Cassette has been making a resurgence of late. Proving that cassette tapes are not just for those of us who remember buying Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ with birthday money, or making lovingly compiled mixtapes for the object of our teenage affections. International Cassette Store Day 2013 is a celebration of a physical product that is accessible, fun, cheap and still going strong in the turbulent current musical climate.
This event sees limited releases from its organisers - SEXBEAT (Fucked Up), Kissability (tbc) and Suplex Cassettes (Fair Ohs, Proper Ornaments); as well as classic albums reissued in this fun format by Transgressive (At The Drive-In, Pulled Apart By Horses), Bella Union (The Flaming Lips), Domino (The Pastels), 4AD (Deerhunter), Wichita Recordings (Hard Skin), Burger Records and many more. Other labels involved spreading the Cassette love with limited releases are Jade Tree, Mirror Universe, Reeks of Effort, Art is Hard, Faux Discx and Tie Dye Tapes and more to be confirmed.
Participating stores will be announced next week, but there are initial commitments from Rough Trade East in London, Burger Records in Orange County, Silent Barn in Brooklyn, and a to be determined shop in Tokyo.