In L.A., cassette culture is in fast-forward
In Sunday's Calendar, I trawled through the corners of Los Angeles' music scene that's still actively recording and releasing albums on glorious...tape. From the garage-rock scrim of Fullerton's Burger Records to the blissy psychedelia of Eagle Rock's Not Not Fun; to Frosty and matthewdavid's all-cassette DJ night at Hyperion Tavern and a grateful but skeptical Pasadena manufacturer, it's a boomlet on the genre margins that nonetheless is giving an old, reviled medium some new cache and a way for fringe bands to make a permanent document of difficult sounds.
As Amanda Brown of Not Not Fun put it -- "Some friends of ours said they were starting a new project that sounded like outsider dinner jazz called Low Light Situations, and we were like 'Great! Why not put this out on tape?'." Read the whole thing here.
-- August Brown