Cassette culture
Often, these cassette-only albums of original music were completely self-produced by the artists, but small companies or labels also flourished during the period, producing cassette-only releases in small runs, both single-artist albums and compilations by various artists (in a few cases these labels also released vinyl).
Numerous artists who first emerged at this time remain active today, some of them now releasing through commercial companies, others continuing with the DIY ethic of self-releasing on CD and the Internet.
The scene was also strongly stimulated by the DIY ethic of punk, and, free of commercial considerations, encouraged musical eclecticism, diversity and experimentation.
[6] Whilst distribution was mostly by mail, there were a few retail outlets that stocked independently produced cassette releases, such as (in the UK) Rough Trade and Falling A.
Popular-music papers such as Sounds and NME in the UK were marked by a new type of journalism, which discussed music (perhaps sometimes over-earnestly) as a serious art-form.
The cassette-culture scene emerged in, was embedded in, this broader cultural landscape, enabled by new developments in electronic technology, and many of the artists shared a countercultural ethos in relation to the mainstream music of the time and towards contemporary society more broadly.
UK cassette culture was championed by marginal musicians and performers such as Tronics,[8] the Instant Automatons,[9] Storm Bugs,[10] Sean T. Wright,[11] the insane picnic, the Cleaners from Venus, Nocturnal Emissions and Final Program, anarcho-punk groups such as the APF Brigade, The Crouches, The Apostles and Chumbawamba, and many of the purveyors of Industrial music, e.g. Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and Clock DVA.
European artists involved in the cassette scene include: Esplendor Geométrico (Spain), Die Tödliche Doris (Germany), Maurizio Bianchi/M.B.
Along with material recorded by himself in various configurations, Neffe curated and released numerous compilations featuring tracks sent to him from artists all over the world.
Artists such as PBK, Big City Orchestra, Alien Planetscapes, Don Campau, Ken Clinger, Dino DiMuro, Tom Furgas, The Haters, Zan Hoffman, If, Bwana, Hal McGee, Minóy, Dave Prescott, Dan Fioretti (who now identifies as female and goes by the name Dreamgirl Stephanie Ashlyn), Jim Shelley, Suburban Campers, The Silly Pillows, Linda Smith, Saboteur, and hundreds of others, recorded albums available only on cassette throughout the late 1980s and well into the 1990s.
In 2015 the independent filmmaker William Davenport released The Great American Cassette Masters, a 90-minute documentary interviewing many key US artists of the 1980s scene.
In 2020 American author Jerry Kranitz published the highly illustrated book Cassette Culture: Homemade Music & The Creative Spirit In The Pre-Internet Age (Vinyl On Demand).
The packaging of cassette releases, whilst sometimes amateurish, was also an aspect of the format in which a high degree of creativity and originality were displayed.
Anusol by the A Band, released on the Chocolate Monk label, came packaged with a "suppository" unique to each copy – one of which was a used condom wrapped in tissue.
[citation needed] The BWCD label released a cassette by Japanese noise artist Aube that came attached to a blue plastic ashtray in the shape of a fish.
On 1 January 2018 Frank Bull of Vinyl On Demand Records launched Tape-Mag.com, a vast online database of cassette-culture and related material.
Material, audio and visual, relating to the cassette culture of the 1970s and 1980s has become widely available on the Internet on platforms such as Bandcamp and Archive.org, and on social media.
A number of compilations devoted to or including significant representation of cassette-culture music of the 1970s and 1980s have been released since the revival of interest in the scene.
In 2008 the Hyped To Death label released the CD Messthetics Greatest Hiss: Classics of the UK Cassette Culture DIY, 1979-1982.
Although not reissued since 1989, mention should also be made of 1983's pioneering double-LP release The Elephant Table Album: a compilation of difficult music, a 21-track selection of work by British cassette-culture artists.
Henderson followed this with a sequel, Three Minute Symphony, another double LP, which threw the net wider to include European and US artists.
