Pitchfork has published a thoughtful article by Marc Hogan about the death and resurrection of the cassette tape as an audio format. Hogan does a great job of presenting the reader with a comprehensive picture of the underground cassette scene that’s populated by artists, labels, and retailers who use the outdated medium to distance themselves from the digital music world.

In an exhaustive 2007 essay, “The Hallucinatory Life of Tape“, music critic Paul Hegarty presents a compelling aesthetic case for cassettes. “Within the dying of media comes the passing or slow dying of individual units– tapes, records, cylinders, cartridges– all of which decay, and in so doing, seem to take on characteristics of having lived,” Hegarty contends. “Once digital media arrive as ‘other’, as cyborg sound, the analogue seems to breathe, however rasping the sound.”

Come the apocalypse, it may be tapes that outlast their digital brethren. Old CDs wind up skipping, anyway– “perfect sound forever” was a lie. Cassettes have their own problems, from unruly tape that you may need to tape together to inevitable disintegration, but there are certainly worse offenders. “Cassettes and vinyl are the analogue cockroaches to the nuclear Armageddon that is digital formats,” Super Furry Animals’ Rhys proclaims. “Back in the 90s when Super Furry Animals were starting out, we used to master tunes to digital DAT tapes if we didn’t have the budget for reel to reel tapes. Most of these are unplayable today. The sound from them has seemingly vanished to thin air. I have had to remaster some back catalogue stuff from cassette copies– which sounds great. It’s unclear how long information will actually last in hard drives. In that sense it’s always worth keeping a vinyl or cassette copy of a piece of music you truly cherish.”