Even at this late date, the cassette reigns supreme as the most democratic of audio formats. First coming to market in 1963, the compact cassette shrunk the magnetic tape spools found in reel-to-reel tapes to a form factor that could fit in your hand, and hold up to 120 minutes of recorded sound. Initially designed to record dictation, cassettes offered immediate gratification for recording enthusiasts around the world. But it wasn’t until 1979, when the first Walkman was released to the public, that the cassette began living up to its promise as the proletariat’s preferred medium. Now, you could bring your favorite music with you as you made your way through the world. As the Walkman’s popularity exploded, the 1980s became a boom time for cassettes, eventually supplanting vinyl as the most popular format on the planet.
Small, affordable, easily mailable, and infinitely malleable, the cassette was perfectly suited to distribute any manner of sound. All of these attributes point to why it became the lingua franca of the international underground music scene. Many of the early proponents of the cassette underground were predisposed to the format as they came from the mail art community that had flourished since the New York Correspondence School was founded by Ray Johnson in the early 1960s. What we know today as the “mixtape” had its early stirrings in compilations cobbled together by underground art movements seeking to connect with each other, the sonic equivalent of an exquisite corpse. The 1980s were a golden age for the format: Hundreds of 90-minute tape compilations criss-crossed the globe, linking bedroom-run labels with the artists they solicited for tracks and, from there, adventurous listeners willing to send a few dollars to a stranger in hopes of receiving a cassette dense with exciting sounds. The thrill of discovery drove these compilations, which often placed incongruous tracks next to each other, forcing the listener to grapple with unexpected sounds, whether assaultive, cloying, or just plain confusing.
In the spirit of these tape labels, Bandcamp is a platform that distinguishes itself with a user-friendly interface that removes many of the barricades associated with streaming sites and prioritizes its content—in this case, music, the reason we’re all here. Besides not requiring a subscription, Bandcamp is far more than a streaming platform: hundreds of tapes are sold every day on the site.
On Bandcamp, the past meets the future—so here we highlight three cassette-focused labels that have their roots in the ‘80s, but have chosen Bandcamp to continue their mission of bringing underground music to the masses.
Calypso Now
A city with two names and two main languages (German and French), Biel/Bienne is also where Switzerland’s famed watchmaking industry is centered. But in the early 1980s, resident Rudi Tüscher was far more interested in forging links with far-flung participants in the international underground than crafting elegant timepieces for the upper classes. Beginning in 1980, Tüscher’s Calypso Now label went on to issue over 200 cassettes by the end of the decade. The majority of releases on Calypso Now were licensed from labels and artists outside the Swiss border. Artists like Cleaners From Venus, Einstürzende Neubauten, Rimarimba, and Eugene Chadbourne had tapes re-released by Calypso Now, exposing their music to curious audiences in new locales.
Various Artists
Stars On Cro2
Yet Tüscher understood the value of a local scene compilation, leading to 1984’s Stars On Cro2 (CrO2 stands for chromium oxide, which was used in magnetic tape emulsion). The compilation spanned two cassettes housed in a plastic wallet with an accompanying booklet.
Teeming with post-punk (including the debut from Chin-Chin), free jazz, percussion ensembles, and even the blues, Stars showcases the diverse Biel/Bienne scene and acts as a sort of cultural exchange program with the wider world.
Various Artists
Sonique Suisse
Among a series of scene compilations on Calypso Now, 1988’s Sonique Suisse stands out. Made for co-release with New York City-based Audiofile Tapes, Sonique Suisse features 24 tracks over the course of a 90-minute tape. Billed as “Alternative Soundscapes From Switzerland,” the collection functions like an audio map of the Swiss underground, containing an early appearance by Young Gods and noise-jazz combo 16-17, but it’s Flowerchildren’s 8-minute-plus ramble “I Wanna Be Free” that best captures the freewheeling nature of this scene.
Years On Earth
Worlds Apart
Cassette
Years On Earth were a UK duo whose triptych of early ‘80s tapes spotlight the atomic age preoccupations of the Cold War-era cassette underground. Their final effort Worlds Apart is a lowkey masterpiece with resigned vocals intoning over the desolate atmosphere, as if the bomb had dropped but they’re safe in the bunker, singing odes to the barren landscape outside.
After nearly 30 years apart, the duo of Bob and Mebz started recording again in 2012 and have now released a string of digital albums.
Chumps
The Problem with Saxophones
Cassette
One of the more intriguing licensing deals Tuscher made was with little-known Washington, D.C. punkers Chumps. If the Contortions had been into the Sonics as much as they were into James Brown, they might have sounded like the wailing, smart-ass Chumps. An early production by storied engineer Don Zientara, The Problem With Saxophones is a bit of a lost classic, coming off like Half Japanese’s cooler older brothers cruising for trouble on a Saturday night. Also on Calypso Now is the ultra-rare Jihad/Chumps tape. The common denominator between these bands is one Rob Kennedy, who went on to front NYC’s Workdogs and is still making music. Another notable member of Jihad was Jerry Williams, who would go on to record hardcore punk classics by Bad Brains, Antidote, MDC, Heart Attack and others.
James Hill
Sausage Failure
After reading about James Hill in tape culture handbook OP Magazine, Tüscher contacted the San Francisco-based trumpet player and ended up releasing four cassettes by Hill in 1984 alone. As of now, two of these tapes are up on Bandcamp, revealing Hill as a truly forward-thinking musician. Augmenting his jazz training with synthesizers and drum machines, Hill recorded his songs on 4-track cassette. Sausage Failure is strikingly prescient, as Hill juxtaposes his relentlessly percolating rhythms with breezy trumpet lines, predicting the likes of Squarepusher a decade ahead of time.
Alternate Media Tapes
Following its first releases in 1987, Alternate Media, founded by musician Mitch Rushton and based in Birmingham, UK, put out nearly 100 tapes between 1989 and 1992. The label was able to accumulate such a staggering number of releases because they were putting out multiple albums from many of the artists they were associated with. With names like Viktimized Karcass, Cancerous Growth, Cephalic Index, and Abortive Gasp, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into a black metal dungeon, but these projects were mostly led by synthesizer acolytes who operated on the edge of noise.
Cephalic Index
Abreaction
Cephalic Index were particularly skilled at balancing discomfiting soundscapes with maniacally oscillating synthesizers. The term “abreaction”—“the expression and release of a previously repressed emotion through reliving the experience that caused it”—neatly encapsulates the urge that inspired much of the darker side of the cassette underground.
Mitch Rushton
Trans Siberian
Not only did Rushton found Alternate Media, he was also on its roster. Inspired by Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, Trans Siberian is like a New Age travelogue, guiding you gently across the vast expanse of the former USSR and dropping you off on the shore of the Sea of Japan.
Maz Mitrenke
Earthworks
With four solo tapes and one collaboration, 1989 was a very busy year for Maz Mitrenke. Of the four, Earthworks is the most satisfying. Ironically, by adding digital percussion to “War Graves,” the elegiac track grows more organic.
penga
Music From The B.E.A.S.T.
Emerging from Alternate Media’s stable of artists, penga now runs the label and curates its Bandcamp page. On this tape, he explores a modular system run through a multi-channel mixing console christened the B.E.A.S.T. (Birmingham Electro-Acoustic Sound Theatre). This set finds penga pushing the technology to its limit, and one can imagine Morton Subotnick nodding in approval.
Quadraphase
Alien Landscapes Live
Quadraphase brings all of the principal players in the Alternate Media universe together to plumb the deepest reaches of the outer realms. Alien Landscapes is the recording of a 1988 gig in Birmingham and everyone (Rushton, penga, Mitrenke and Brett Valiant) acquits themselves nicely.
Emphasizing how Alternate Media’s ultimate goal was to facilitate uncommercial art’s presence in the world, you can snag everything Alternate Media has put up on Bandcamp (130 releases!) for significantly less than one dollar per digitized tape.
EE Tapes
Starting in 1987, Belgian label EE released mostly cassettes throughout the ‘90s until transitioning to CD-Rs by the turn of the millennium. Eventually, EE graduated to commercial CDs, then vinyl, and now Bandcamp. While much of EE’s tape catalog hasn’t made it to Bandcamp, some of its releases are available on the artists’ own pages, such as Konstruktivists, M.NOMIZED, and De Fabriek. In the meantime, EE has been putting out new records along with reissues.
The Crawling Chaos
The Big C
Vinyl LP
The Crawling Chaos was one of the weirder bands to find their voice in the UK’s post-punk firmament, which made them strange bedfellows with Factory Records, who put out their first album, 1982’s masterful The Gas Chair. Two years later, the Crawling Chaos self-released The Big C. In 2020, EE repressed the album in an effort to make the Crawling Chaos’s bizarre aesthetic more broadly available. By turns haunting, mocking, ridiculous and beautiful, The Big C still casts a long shadow.
Het Zweet
2XLIVE88
Compact Disc (CD)
Het Zweet was Marien van Oers, a Dutch experimentalist who constructed tape loops, amplified shopping carts, and pounded on found objects, layering all of this into beguiling pieces threaded with possessed chanting and sorrowful singing. The performances captured here reveal a craftsman at work, as if Van Oers was a sculptor of experience, not material.
Brume
La Violence du Néant
Compact Disc (CD)
Since 1985, French composer Christian Renou has released dozens of tapes, LPs, and CDs under the Brume moniker. 2023’s La Violence du Néant finds his expertise at navigating the border between unnerving noise and spine-tingling beauty to be on point as ever.
Cassette Art Classics
Having operated the Cause and Effect label in the 1980s with Debbie Jaffe, Hal McGee started Cassette Art Classics to present authorized editions that live up to its nomenclature. You’ll find a survey of classics from important labels like Sound of Pig, Harsh Reality Music, and Audiofile, as well as self-released gems from all over the world.
Alien Planetscapes
Everybody’s Mad At Amerikkka!
Before leaving this planet in 2006, Doug Walker piloted Alien Planetscapes to countless new vistas (supposedly 106 tapes bear the project’s stamp) with a cast of revolving personnel. On this particular epic journey, Walker is joined by Carl Howard, who ran Audiofile Tapes. Like most Alien Planetscapes releases, this one sets controls for the heart of the sun and doesn’t let up until everyone’s face is good and melted. Despite taking his musical cues from Tangerine Dream, Cluster, and Hawkwind, Walker wasn’t solely concerned with traveling the spaceways. Walker—a Black multi-instrumentalist—used the titles of his albums to address social issues (Children Of Slaves, Stop Light Pollution, Freedom Riders, The Greenhouse Effect) while the music pointed to a way out of his earthbound origins and tribulations.
Minóy
Firebird
One of the most prolific mail artists and home tapers of all time was Stanley Keith Bowsza, who went by the pseudonym Minóy. For a decade, he was incredibly active in the international tape community, collaborating with key figures such as Al Margolis from If, Bwana, who also ran Sound of Pig, and John Hudak and David Prescott, who co-ran Generations Unlimited with Gen Ken Montgomery. Firebird is an excellent example of the eerie noise that Minóy specialized in. After appearing on over 100 tapes, many of them hand-packaged, Minóy ceased operations by the mid-1990s. Despite this, unreleased music has come out at a steady clip ever since, even after Bowsza passed away in 2010. Another prolific noise taper and Minóy collaborator PBK has undertaken the massive project of remastering and posting many of Minóys cassette works on a Bandcamp page dedicated to the artist. A listener could spend a few months getting lost on this page alone.
The fact that many of these artists and labels have taken to Bandcamp in an effort to preserve their tape-based music is a testament to both formats. Tapes don’t last forever and perhaps digital files won’t either, but by combining the two, conservators can safeguard this vital corner of underground culture.
