In 1992, I was four years old and the time had come for my older brothers to move out. At the ages of twenty and twenty-one, they sought careers in the “real world.” Moving into dingy apartments on the outskirts of Boston, they were forced to leave behind many of their childhood possessions and relics. I became an only child overnight. My best friend became my brother Scott’s old teddy bear named “Bunky,” who was almost my size and a deep shade of chocolate brown. In the wake of their departure from our parent’s house I discovered a life-altering piece of machinery – a Sony Walkman.
It was the SPORT version of the Sonys Walkman, which meant it was slightly less boxy and a brilliant shade of yellow. It included an AM/FM radio tuner and the luxurious Auto-Reverse feature. My brother had left it behind a stack of old comic books in his closet, when it was replaced by a much sleeker CD player. I found a pair of headphones and a stack of my parents’ cassette tapes.
Each tape was exactly 3×4 inches, but their hard plastic exteriors varied in color. The outer casing contained a reel of magnetic tape that contained about twenty to thirty minutes of pre-recorded sound. My parent’s eclectic collection featured everything from showtunes and jazz to classic rock and reggae. Staring at the small wall of plastic cassette tapes, I haphazardly selected The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. I removed the clear plastic tape from its case and jammed it eagerly into the Walkman.
The first track on Side A of the cassette was “California Girls.” I sat cross-legged on my bedroom’s teal carpet, and for the first time ever I really listened to music. It was uninterrupted and singular, without commercials or the distracting images of a Disney sing-along. I was infatuated by the music and the machinery that was used to reproduce it.
Upon discovering my fascination, my parents purchased me my very own portable cassette player. It was made by Little Tikes, and had big multi-colored buttons. I continued to steal my parent’s cassettes and dance around the house for years. Billy Joel, The Beatles and every other tape lying around found its way into my ears and embedded itself into my memory. Things began to change in second grade when I discovered FM radio, and by third grade I had bought a CD player. I began to purchase music from the artists I heard on the radio and soon my parents’ cassettes lay forgotten.
Now even CDs have seemingly come and gone. Computers are used to play music files that are stored alphabetically in iTunes libraries. The sound quality is immaculate, and the files will never age or get damaged. If your computer breaks then you can just download the same audio file onto your new one. You can even put the music files on your cell phone or MP3 player to take it wherever you want. In all senses digital music is more convenient, accessible and produces a nearly perfect replication of the recordings. In all rights, cassettes and CDs should be legally confirmed as archaic mementos, but something strange has begun to happen. Cassette tapes have been resurfacing.
The genre of music that is championing the return of listening to music on magnetic tape has been labeled Glo-fi (or Chillwave). A break off of Lo-fi electronica, Glo-fi can be characterized by its dreamy warped sound that is evocative of slow summer afternoons. Spacey and drenched in reverb, Glo-fi woozily drifts through walls of dreamy synths and distant vocals. Samples and loops float over down-tempo beats and create a sound somewhere between shoegaze and synthpop. In other words, the music feels like driving home from the beach in August with a car full of your best friends and everyone is feeling sun soaked and sleepy.
So why does this warped, nostalgic genre have an obsession with cassette tapes?
The simple answer could be that hipsters are fascinated with irrelevant artifacts of the past. Yet there is something deeper to this resurgence. For a genre so focused on retracing memories and dreams, cassettes feel like a natural choice.
Cassettes are a tangible attachment to youth and to a time when music was represented by a physical object. So when bands like Washed Out, Memory Tapes and Universal Studios Florida release their albums on cassette it isn’t just for laughs, it is an aesthetic decision.
To package Glo-fi onto cassettes is a decision to immerse the listener fully in the woozy nostalgia the genre seeks to evoke.
