An international event now in its 6th year, Cassette Store Day was created by Suplex Cassettes and Sexbeat Records in an attempt to celebrate the nostalgic format, with stores from across the UK, France, North America and Japan stocking special CSD releases and hosting live performances. 

We're determined to get you the full inside opinions here at native, so we got chatting to those right in the middle of the scene for you.

Us young 'milennials' are probably the last generation to remember non-ironically listening to cassettes as an actual serious media format (pre-Brexit, when the charts weren't full of Drake and What's New Scooby-Do was life... those were the days). Rifling through parents’ collections, some professional releases, others homemade mixtapes, smudged inky writing on shop-bought blank covers, fiddling with the plastic cases and trying to get the paper insides to go back in after their contents had been thoroughly examined. That's the scenario we're in.

There’s the repetitive, almost unconscious pattern of having to stop, eject, turn over a cassette to get to the b-side, the comforting silence then the final click of a tape played all the way through to the end. It's as nostalgic as the PlayStation 1 start up tune. Our parents’ collections were Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, some strange Pete Seeger tracks... artists who would just about scrape a slot as a Glastonbury 'Legend' this year, but their cassettes were all the rage back then.


Having said that, cassettes are so steeped in memory and nostalgia that it comes as somewhat of a surprise that this medium is still very much alive and kicking.

There’s much to be said for the physicality of holding a piece of art in your hands, but we struggled to understand why artists still choose not only to release tapes but to use them in the music-making process. We caught up with a fourth year maths student at the University of Bristol who uses cassette loops to create music as well as releasing tapes under the name S*it Creek on the seriously cool Liquid Library (whose slogan, fittingly, is ‘Lo-fi till we die’). Much of the draw for him seems to be the limitations afforded by the format, as he tells us: "you’re forced to be much more creative - there’s a different sound potential there. Instead of the photorealism of digital music, you get an abstraction of the sound that’s gone in rather than a mirror image." And so, the format itself becomes an artistic element of the final product - pretty neat.

In addition to this, there’s the immediacy and accessibility of tape - if you wanted to produce a vinyl, they can only be pressed in large quantities, whereas a single cassette can be created almost no time at all, as long as you have a few blank tapes lying around. S*it Creek sees tapes as being fairly removed from the regular music economy - rather, there’s a barter system in place, exchanging tapes and paying in kind rather than using them as a product to sell. Part of this has to do with the actual music that’s being released on tapes - we spoke to Matthew Rozeik, who is behind the cassette label Extreme Ultimate, who was able to give us some more insight.

Based in London, he started to release from his label as a way of getting his friend’s music out there that he liked, like the SoundCloud of cassettes - music that, in his own words, "was probably a bit untrendy for the current musical climate - I've released ambient synth music, death metal, psych, acid, drone, noise rock and crust punk." Like S*it Creek, Rozeik sees tapes as being so valuable to the underground music scene because they’re so cheap and easy to create - "most artists and labels who produce music of, shall we say limited appeal, cannot afford to press their music on vinyl. Cassettes offer a way to distribute their music cheaply, and gives fans something physical to keep."


When we ask him about the value of Cassette Store Day, S*it Creek’s first thought is not for the money or publicity potential to be generated (such a breath of fresh air in the modern music industry to find an artist who's not obsessed with money and getting free ferraris when rapping about them) - rather he talks about it as an opportunity to forge new connections on the scene. "We’re quite inwards looking, everything is very localised." Despite being a bit of a closed community, S*it Creek sees the cassette making scene as incredibly diverse - "it’s sort of a voice for the marginalised, people whose music wouldn’t get heard otherwise. There’s no financial gain in it, no ego."

He also provides us with this gem: as for underground music, "if you enjoy making it, someone will enjoy hearing it." Nice. Matthew Rozeik shares this sentiment - and with it, a scepticism of the commercialism of Cassette Store Day - "there is always a danger of larger labels co-opting these initiatives to sell their products at inflated prices: something that goes against the DIY spirit of tape releasing in my humble opinion."


That being said, there are currently 57 exclusive releases announced for the UK, and a further 136 from North America. Releases range from Lancastrian art-pop (Family Selection Box is releasing their lovely DIY album Confetti through Bingo Records), to self-described coldwave/spacegoth/dronecrunch/gravewave Icelandic trio Anitmony’s OVA (whatever the hell those genres are), released by First Light, to a 40th Anniversary Nick Lowe album released by Yep Roc Records. Truly, something for everyone. A bit closer to home, Bristol’s own Cafe Kino will be hosting a tape fair and live performances throughout the day, so get down, get mingling and get supporting your local artists.

Cassette are magical nostalgia, but DJs today can still headline the O2 with just a couple of presses of a button. What is the industry coming to.