Tale of the tape

SOUND DEFENSE “I”m OCD about my music collection. I’m constantly worried about things getting scratched,” Plustapes cofounder Dustin Drase tells us.

Photo: Martha Williams

Cassette tapes are looked upon as plastic litter from long-gone college crushes and an era of wanton album buying. In 1990, the record industry sold 74.3 million cassettes. Last year, that number bottomed out at 34,000. But among a certain niche, primarily noise rock and droning experimental music, genres that work comfortably in the realm of hiss and lo-fidelity, tapes never went away. And now, an indie scene steeped in nostalgia is returning to the format. Labels such as Plustapes, Catholic Tapes, Permanent Records and Priority Male lead the local cassette scene, as hyped bands like Deerhunter release albums on tape.

Dustin Drase, 32, works as a photo librarian for Publications International Ltd., a bargain-book manufacturer in the North Suburbs. In his off time, the Lincoln Square resident deejays, serves as operations manager for the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP) and operates the burgeoning Plustapes and its sister vinyl label, Addenda. In late 2008, a group of seven friends decided to cofound a record label, hoping to release wax editions of albums that never saw print on 12-inch LP. When it came time to pony up the money, only Drase and Michael Ardaiolo remained. Vinyl is costly, about $5.50 per album (CDs about $1.50), so the two rookie record honchos went with tapes. A cassette costs less than a game of Pac-Man.

Initially, Plustapes “tried doing high-speed dubbing, but it sounded like shit,” Drase says. Copying in real time, “each run took us a couple of weeks, with a week of cutting and folding the covers.” After Ardaiolo took a teaching job in Korea, a fellow microlabel directed the exhausted Drase to National Audio Company, one of the few remaining cassette manufacturers in the U.S.

While the majority of the tape releases come from Brooklyn, San Francisco and Chicago, most of the product is created in Springfield, Missouri. Over the last decade, National Audio owner Steve Stepp continued to see a market in tapes. “Major producers went out,” the middle-aged manager says, “but spoken-word cassette never went away. It remained popular with churches and schools. Over the last year, we’ve seen a big resurgence. Private labels. Experimental music. We’re doing probably five to ten new groups per day.” As major labels downsized, National picked up large industrial tape duplicators at auction from folks like Sony and Warner Bros. Which means that the recent Dum Dum Girls tape on Art Fag Recordings might have been made on the same machine as Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.

“Lots of people who put out tapes like to name their labels offensively. It’s a subversive format, so why not just say fuck ’em all,” Lance Barresi, co-owner of Permanent Records, says with a laugh. (Aside from Art Fag, there’s Fuck It Tapes, Fag Tapes, Brown Interior, Fan Death, etc.) The Ukrainian Village shop and label is one of Chicago’s major purveyors of tapes. “Sometimes we’ll sell more of a cassette tape than a major indie Pitchfork-touted CD release,” Barresi says. “It’s cheap. If you’re drunk or on a bike, you can just pocket it.”

Cassettes can be run in miniscule three-figure batches, 100 or 200, cost-prohibitive quantities on vinyl or CD, for as little as $18 in setup costs. Everyone we speak with cites low price, portability and durability in defense of the cassette. These were the original arguments for the format. What helped kill it off was the sound quality in comparison to CD. But some will stick up for the fidelity of tapes.

“They have a warmer sound than digital music. Close to vinyl, but not the same,” says Dan Smith, who hand-prints tiny batches of tapes on his Neon Blossom imprint to raise funds for his annual underground music festival, Neon Marshmallow. Barresi speaks less romantically but sees the positives: “It’s not a high-fidelity format. But it’s unique. If you like that lo-fi sound, the tape is going to automatically add hiss. A lot of the artists that do tapes could give a shit about fidelity.”

Of course, most adolescents these days don’t even buy physical music and have become accustomed to the low quality of online audio. Tapes aren’t a drop-off in sound if you’re only used to iLike and iTunes in a digital-dominated marketplace.

Indie rock has always been about a collector’s mentality. Think of tapes as baseball cards for favorite bands. Drase says, “Sometimes I get people buying tapes who don’t even have tape players.”

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