Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape (2016) – Review

Review Cassette a mixtape history
Nostalgia is something everyone and every generation goes through. If you look at the eigthies (for example Back to the Future) people were looking back at the fifties. It’s understandable. As people get older they long for the period they were growing up, so things which were popular 20 to 40 years ago are suddenly more popular. Whether it’s the TV shows you watched as a kid, the toys you played with or the game consoles that were popular when you grew up, people start looking for them again or collect them. It sometimes can also mean the resurgence of old formats. We already have seen this happening with LP’s, but this documentary shows it is also true for cassette tapes.

I myself had a huge collection of them. I started out in the eighties simply recording music played on the radio. Later there was a music library in my town, where you could rent CD’s. I was there every week, getting the latest albums for next to nothing and copying them all to cassettes. I even had a special program on my PC which allowed me to print a custom inlay. My Walkman was something I wouldn’t leave home without and I even used it as a nickname when using the first messaging boards. But as time moved on, so did I and cassettes were replaced by CDs (and a Discman) and the tapes started gathering dust. I threw a lot of them out and kept the unlabelled ones to go through later to decide what to do (which I never did). If you grew up with cassettes you probably have your own stories about them and so do the people in this film, this includes Henry Rollins and Thurston Moore. It also looks at the labels, bands and collectors who are still into the format and even release new music this way.

Lou ottens Cassette A Documentary Mixtape review

The most interesting though is the interview with the inventor of the format itself, dutchman Lou Ottens who worked at Philips. He tells the story how the cassette was developed and also brings together some of the people who helped to design it. He’s hinks people are a bit crazy to prefer listening to music through the format as the CD and digital are much better. So no nostalgic feelings for him (except for the people around him), but that doesn’t stop a small group of people still being passionate about magnetic tape protected by a plastic case. This well shot documentary is worth a look if you grew up with listening to cassettes.

[score7]

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