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In October 2012 I attended Soundwalk, an outdoor festival of sound art installations in Long Beach, California. One of the featured exhibits was a large, spare pyramid made of thin metal tubes. The artist wordlessly smiled thanks at my compliments, and then handed me a cassette tape labelled 'Midnight Pyramid' and 'Lavish Womb'. The paper sleeve for the tape was low-budget, perhaps printed out at FedEx Kinko's, with a grainy background image of Egyptian pyramids, and no accompanying text or track information. This mysterious gift brought to mind several questions. Did I still own a tape player? Assuming I did, what would I hear on the tape? And, to invoke the parlance of John Oliver, how was tape still a thing? But this was merely my tardy introduction to the cassette tape revival, which I since learned had been going on for at least the previous ten years. Back at home, I was able to play Midnight Pyramid's tape briefly, only long enough to hear a few electronic drones, before my just-recovered tape player broke, a casualty of dust and leaked battery acid.
This article addresses the current revival of tape culture. But a few parameters should first be clarified. 'Revival' suggests that a practice fell out of usage before being taken up again. But cassette tapes have never really fallen out of usage since their invention in 1963. 1Outside of North America and Western Europe, the tape is still an important medium for sound recording, and is even mounting a comeback in hard drives as a viable medium for data storage.2For whom, then, is this a revival? The evidence indicates that we are witnessing a practice relevant to a small selection of relatively young pop music aficionados, people either under thirty or for whom musical taste tends towards recent music.3But again, this frame is not helpful. The sheen of youth and newness is ill fitting because the tape revival draws from a larger revival of the music, sartorial codes, and general culture of the 1980s. Simon Reynolds describes this phenomenon as 'retromania', or the recycling of past music and culture. 4When people who were born after 1995 take up a set of signifiers that were rooted in...