Cassette culture is the international network of home-recording musicians, small labels and fanzines that grew around the compact cassette from the late 1970s and flourished through the 1980s. Affordable multitrack recorders from makers such as Tascam and Fostex let artists produce albums at home, while the postal service did the distributing: by the early 1980s musicians across several continents were trading original tapes by mail, reviewed in zines such as OP, Sound Choice and Factsheet Five.
The network mattered most for noise, industrial and experimental music, which had little access to record shops. Throbbing Gristle sold tapes by mail and issued a case of 24 cassettes in 1980; Merzbow and Nurse With Wound circulated work through the same channels; and labels such as Al Margolis’s Sound of Pig, founded in 1984, released hundreds of titles. The format suited long, continuous pieces, and its hiss, wear and generational loss became part of an aesthetic that later fed into hauntology and lo-fi drone.