Few people saw this coming: the revival of the cassette tape. Even artists like Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift are releasing new music on this tiny medium, which everyone thought had gone for good.
A familiar task for any self-respecting music fan in the 1970s and 1980s was making your own compilation tapes. You played them on the car radio or your Walkman, or gave them to someone you were fond of. They were carefully selected and usually had a common theme. It was a time-consuming business, as you had to trawl through your record collection searching for suitable tracks.
Once the mix tape was finished, the fun could start. You’d drive around with the windows down, bike to school, or simply imagine how the recipient would feel when they heard this perfect collection of songs and saw the cover you’d created for them…
But cassette tapes soon lost their shine when CDs and MP3s hit the market in the late 1980s. They suddenly became a hassle: all that winding forward and rewinding to find your favourite track, the tape getting jammed or coming loose and having to be rewound with a pencil, sticky tape to hold everything together, and the abrupt endings in the middle of a song.
Tape swap
It was much easier to burn a CD on the computer. By the turn of this century, you could download almost anything you wanted to hear from the internet via peer-to-peer software like Kazaa and Napster. The quality of MP3s was better (although opinions on this were divided), but people started to miss the ‘warm’ sound of a cassette tape.
Not many people realise this, but cassette tapes never really disappeared. They still exist on a smaller scale in the hip-hop, underground and noise scenes, where artists have continued to use them through the decades. And now, years after vinyl, cassette tapes are making a come-back with among substantial target groups.
Concert hall-cum-cultural centre ACU is responding to this development by combining its ‘Noisevember’ noise event with an opportunity to exchange cassettes: Scrapcode cassette swap. So what exactly is ‘noise’? ‘Noise tries to approach and cross the boundaries of music,’ explains the organiser Dimitri Demirel. ‘You sometimes hear a mainstream band going wild at the end of a number with feedback and effects. You could say this is where noise begins – we continue on from this point. Sometimes the hall is empty by the end of a show, but some audiences love it. Having said this, everyone does wear earplugs!’
Do it yourself
So in his scene, cassette tapes have never gone away, says Dimitri. ‘They’re a loud medium: they never sound perfect and people have a sort of DIY attitude to them. This fits in with the noise culture, where it’s normal to record your own music and swap it with others. When I invite noise artists along, they always bring cassette tapes. Sometimes with their own music, sometimes with other projects. And I do the same when I perform.’
So Dimitri’s plan to set up a cassette swap didn’t come completely out of the blue. How will the evening be organised? ‘The room will be full of tables where artists can work. Some solo, some in pairs. They have ten minutes to play. They tend not to use guitars, instead preferring home-made electronics, mixing panels, contact microphones, effect pedals and such. The cassette tapes are swapped on the stage.’
Dimitri is happy about the revival of this old-fashioned sound medium. ‘It’s handy for me, as I won’t need to go to second-hand shop to find tapes anymore. I can just go to Broese on Oudegracht, for example.’
Scrapcode cassette swap, 18 November 2025 from 19:30 (free), ACU
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Over dit artikel
text:
Machiel Coehorst
images:
Volodymyr Hryshchenko/UNSPLASH, Bruno-Guerrero/UNSPLASH
Publication date:
7 November 2025
Magazine edition:
UITagenda Utrecht november 2025
