As
this viral video recently demonstrated, cassette tapes can be strange and mysterious things when you've only been consuming music for the past few years. I suspect I'm a fair bit older than the two boys struggling with their mum's Walkman in that YouTube clip, but while I am reasonably familiar with the format - my parents used to have a stack of
Play School tapes that kept lil' Joel entertained on many a long car journey - I still see the cassette as something of an enigma.
You see, when you listen to a CD (my format of choice), you're usually given a clear indication of which track you're hearing, and it's easy to skip to your favourite song and generally find your way around the album. Cassettes, on the other hand, are far harder to navigate; you have to keep track of what's playing pretty vigilantly, otherwise you'll hear a song you love and you'll have no way to accurately establish which of the titles listed on the case it corresponds to. Oh, and heaven help you if the damn thing hasn't been rewound.
Weirdly, cassette tapes have enjoyed something of a
renaissance of late, presumably because the hip young things whose inexplicable purchasing choices led to the recent vinyl revival decided that, what with Tesco now selling vinyl LPs alongside their microwaveable Italian dishes, it was time for an even more inconvenient and obsolete format to become the fashionable choice. Hence such nonsense as
Cassette Store Day.
Still, while I personally will not be trading my CDs for cassettes any time soon, I still appreciate it when artists do something unusual with their chosen format, even if that format's heyday ended while Margaret Thatcher was still in office. This brings me to
Kassette, a release from last year that features music from both Schizo Fun Addict (from New Jersey) and The Bordellos (from Merseyside).
Fun Fact: The artwork was provided by John Squire from The Stone Roses.
