Welcome to The Tape Label Report, where we introduce you to five cassette-focused labels you should know about, and highlight key releases from each.
Insert Tapes
Cassette
“We just want to make cool cassettes with cool people.”
The Sweden-based Insert Tapes has operated within this simple framework since its founding in early 2017, chronicling the prolific and unabashedly DIY output of the internet’s lo-fi hip-hop community.
“It all started back in the old lofi.hiphop forum,” says the label’s owner, who prefers to remain anonymous. “Everything was so homemade, dusty, and new at the same time, and I really wanted to be a part of what was going on there. The big thing was putting out beat tapes, and in a few instances they were actually made into real cassettes. That was mind-blowing to me at the time.”
Inspired by labels like Inner Ocean and o-nei-ric, Insert launched with a beat tape by Italian producer Naif. Since then, they’ve hand-pressed over 250 releases to cassette, representing the globe-spanning, highly collaborative scope of the lo-fi scene. At the outset, Insert’s aim was to be a digital storefront that allowed any beatmaker to submit their work for physical distribution. Since then, the label’s growth has inspired evolution.
“At the start, I tried to make as many tapes as I possibly could, and I saw Insert as a general cassette store and not really a store with releases selected by us,” says the founder. “Now we don’t have as much time to produce and sell every tape we get in our inbox, but we try.”
The label’s eponymous compilation trilogy, released annually from 2017 to 2019, played a major role in increasing Insert’s profile.
“We mainly did that as a fun thing to try out,” they say. “We did not think anyone would actually listen, so we didn’t check the stats for many months. After logging in, we were presented with millions of streams across platforms, which was mind-boggling for us, since we were totally independent and have few connections. This made us confident enough to continue Insert Tapes expanding our vision. But the main idea is still just to have fun and be involved in as many cool projects as we can.”
Release to Start With
Various Artists
Midnight Snack: Changua
Cassette
Insert is currently excited about their Midnight Snack mixtape series, which invites digital artists to theme a beat compilation around a food and cover design of their choice. The latest entry is Changua, inspired by Colombian illustrator David Mattos Lopez’s favorite dish. Featuring 20 submissions from label fans and past collaborators, it’s an ideal introduction to Insert’s soporific sound, laced with woozy smooth jazz chord progressions and glitched trumpet chops. Saaaz and Injijo’s “This Way” is a particularly pretty selection, arranging a lush chorus of pitch-shifted vocal samples around a looped keyboard glissando—it’s as warm and nourishing as reheated leftovers after a long night out.
—Jude Noel
RokLok Records
Cassette
RokLok’s Mike Andriani started his label in 1998 to document a thriving Long Island punk and hardcore scene—his first release showcased the melodic hardcore of local heroes On the Might of Princes. But in the late aughts his focus shifted to homemade, lo-fi pop recorded on minimal equipment in bedrooms and basements.
The shift coincided with Andriani’s changing lifestyle. As he got older, he found himself less inclined to go to shows every night but still passionate about discovering new music. “At the same time, there was a huge proliferation of homemade music,” says Andriani. “Labels like Juniper Tree Songs and Team Love were documenting and distributing amazing ambient, lo-fi, bedroom pop and all sorts of stuff. I’d found a new scene to be a part of.”
Andriani grew up ordering tapes from K Records and Shrimper and trading homemade cassettes through the mail. Now with a growing online presence and connections to home-recording artists around the world, he looks for DIY creativity across geographic boundaries. “People, especially if they’re geographically isolated, may not be able to find people to play music with, but if they have a laptop and an interface, they can create music,” says Andriani, noting that he has released music from lo-fi artists all over the United States and in the UK, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. “Regardless of what our native tongue may be or our upbringing or where we live, we have these common threads of wanting to create and express ourselves and it’s really nice to be able to share that,” he adds.
Release to Start With
White Blush
White Blush
Cassette
White Blush, from Chicago, shows how ambitious RokLok’s bedroom pop aesthetic can be. The artist (real name Carol Rhyu) spins delicate dream pop over a roiling mass of low-end in opener “Neptune,” the song’s sleek, layered sound recalls the throbbing hum of Stereolab or the swirling psychedelia of the Cocteau Twins. Later, “Mysterieux” starts small and swells to epic size as Rhyu’s whispery voice crests over wall-shaking synth blasts and syncopated breakbeats. “Jolene” (not a cover) rocks the foundations of its wonder-pop melody with sledge-hammer beats. These are tender little tunes that blow the windows out.
—Jennifer Kelly
Steep Gloss
Cassette
Steep Gloss, the brainchild of Ross Scott-Buccleuch, is home to cassette-based experimental musical collaborations. Based in the northwest UK, the label arrived in the world just prior to the pandemic with distorted mulch and harsh blasts from Andrew Sharpley & Romain Perrot (aka Vomir) and Earth Trumpet & Midwich’s abstract, psychedelic spree.
From his own tape experiments as an artist under the aliases Diurnal Burdens and Liminal Haze to the mixtapes his dad made for him when he was younger, Scott-Buccleuch explains that cassettes created a “gateway for me hearing new things…so there’s a love there that’s just not going to go away.”
There’s also a literary influence informing Steep Gloss’s approach. Now defunct imprint Chomu Press required that submissions to their publishing house had “a quiet and profound sense of mystery” or “the feeling of a deep, unfathomable atmosphere, beyond words,” something they referred to as “yūgen.”
Whilst Scott-Buccleuch’s requirements aren’t as strict, the label retains a similarly enigmatic tone, a sense of mystique amongst the reels. So, whether you’re listening to experimental psych-folk courtesy of Staraya Derevnya & Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet, Body Has No Head’s Dadaist sound collages, the industrial horror of Mold Omen, or the Blank Tape compilation series wherein artists create four-minute recordings using blank tapes as their sole source material, this elusive atmosphere prevails.
Release To Start With
Yol & David Curington
A Typical Sunday
Cassette
Yol & David Curington’s A Typical Sunday is a stupefying, erratic patchwork of clipped found sounds, drone welts, crowd disturbances, mish-mashed hubbub, and voices descending into white noise. Yol’s voice leaks in as if from crossed radio waves. They yelp about police tape, smashed windows, and joggers, coupling the accusatory tone of Genesis P-Orridge with Alan Dubin’s chaotic Khanate paranoia.
Curington’s wild collages are a kaleidoscope of confusion hit with a barrage of distortion. There’s snatched dialogue. Sounds are reversed and mangled. Conversations become warped into silvery sounds which resemble shook cutlery drawers. Any glimmer of almost familiar melody emerges solely to be engulfed within the chaos. Over this jumble, Yol struggles to be heard. Their rants become increasingly strained to break through the sonic blizzard, inevitably resulting in a howl so anguished it could rupture ears. Dovetailing delightfully with the darkened humor of Steep Gloss, this is a lovely little Sunday, indeed.
—Jon Buckland
Wimbleheim Records
Cassette
A small German port city nestled in a fjord just south of the Danish border, Flensburg is hardly an obvious location for a hyperpop-neofunk-electro-experimental-rock-et-cetera tape label like Wimbleheim Records. But that’s where Leif Marcussen and Alex Becker happen to live, so that’s where they decided to create a scene, or at least something concrete around which a scene could arrange itself. Coming into the summer of 2021, they and several of their friends had spent lockdown exploring individual solo projects. The timing was right. The music was there. It just needed a label.
Marcussen views physical media as a means of creative closure. “It’s hard to really come to an end with a project because you don’t have anything in your hand,” he says. As someone self-funding a label, tapes are the only realistic option. “Nobody wants CDs now. Vinyl is super expensive these days,” he says. “So tape is the last thing that you can do yourself and release.”
Which is precisely what Wimbleheim has done. There’s feel-good ‘80s Paul Simon and freak-folk pastiche from Frankly. There’s jittery slacker rock from juniperi, and textured R&B-ified electro from Neverchamp. Notable for being “the only band on our label” (and the only act that uses live drums), Skin squeeze both bossa nova horns and barely-tuned post-punk riffs onto debut album Entertainment. And on the label website there’s a minigame where you play as a cassette tape, hopping around collecting snippets from a 2021 compilation track list.
It’s intentionally silly, which is to say it’s right in line with Wimbleheim’s M.O. “We don’t want to sell a product. We just want to make a scene and make something nice,” says Marcussen. “It’s the fun of it that’s in the focus. Not, like, trying to get big at some point.”
Release To Start With
bxris bekka
Clubheimromantik Für Immer
Vinyl LP, Cassette
Marcussen and Becker were a music-making duo before they were a label-running one, and their project bxris bekka predates Wimbleheim by several years. (The project name references the German tennis star Boris Becker, only “spelled horribly wrong for legal reasons,” says Marcussen.) The latest and loosest LP from the project, this year’s Clubheimromantik Für Immer, is part shuffle-friendly breakbeat electro odyssey and part gauzy yacht rock retrofuturist fantasy. It’s energetic and playful, with a particularly irresistible effervescence to disco-leaning cuts like “cruuu” and “Hush Hush.” Frankly shows up twice, elevating dreamy standout “Cream Cheese” with a certain melancholy. “It’s weird to say because it’s also my music, but the whole of Wimbleheim went into the record because we started the first song when we started Wimbleheim,” says Marcussen. “Now it’s out. Now we’re looking to evolve again. We’re not sure what’s coming next.”
—Elle Carroll
Zamzamrec
Cassette
Magic. That’s the thread that binds together Zamzamrec and their grimoire of albums. Founded in Bristol and now based in France, the label has spent 12 years turning out experimental music that relies as much on chance and alchemy as it does creative choice.
A recurring approach in Zamzam’s discography is the use of old instruments to explore modern ideas, or new instruments to interrogate old ones. Mark Wagner’s S☉N RISE / S☉N OF THE SUN is a piano and voice-oriented album about the ancient philosophical system of Hermeticism that’s punctured by synthesizers and glitchy beats. On Apocrypha, MXLX twists and mangles Fender Rhodes jams into sinewy dark ambient. Even at the more conventional end of the discography, Orryx’s Ifera—a collection of goth-pop that recalls Purity Ring remixed by Vangelis—has vocal parts looped until they become somehow pre-lingual. These artists are like ancient druids, with one foot in the elemental past, and one in the future.
Zamzam’s roster often seems to channel unseen forces. (Even the album names recall incantations: see Abracadabra or Brumas, Nieblas, Neblinas.) It’s a safe harbor for albums such as Henry Collins’s Prepared Rain, which documents the sound of a downpour hitting a variety of prepared objects, and Pascal Dickens’ For Joy, where birdsong accompanies the scattered folk songs. Indeed, when listening to much of Zamzam Records’s catalog, there’s the slightly uncanny feeling that the music has simply created itself.
Release to Start With
ZOHASTRE
ABRACADABRA
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Zohastre are a French-Italian duo formed of Héloïse Thibault and Olmo Guadagnoli (who also founded Zamzam.) Abracadabra is their second album. Like much in Zamzam’s discography, the pair are keen to subvert traditional songwriting—the liner notes state that Abracadabra “circumvents all that boring ‘song’ stuff for full-on sensation.” This focus on visceral experience leads to the swampy grooves in “Wizzarding” (an album highlight) and the interplay between doomy sludge and blast beats on “Spleen.”
One major influence on Abracadabra is the tarantella dance of southern Italy, which can be heard in the whirling time signatures, fast tempos, and frenzied energy. Zohastre even incorporated bagpipe—an instrument sometimes used to accompany the tarantella—after unearthing old tape recordings of bagpipe music in Italy. Here, the duo weave the samples into the churning kosmische backing, looping, and processing them until they become dislocated from their provenance. On “Rondes et Chansons” they stutter and throb, while on “‘Esplumeor” they’re folded into the tooth-rattling coda.
