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The cassette tape has been skulking in the shadows for the past few years and it appears that this near-obsolete format is beginning to creep back into the spotlight. First there was Autechre's infamous Draft 7.30 promo, then the 2005 Thurston Moore edited Mix Tape: The Art Of Cassette Culture, which positioned the cassette tape as American folk art. More recently, recordings of countless mixtapes from the 80s and 90s have been popping up on music blogs the world over offering listeners an opportunity to listen to the sounds of a specific moment in time.

Adding fuel to this fire is a recent Designboom feature which explores several facets of contemporary cassette tape culture. These include collecting vintage blank tapes, repurposing tapes as digital storage media, all manner of fashion related retrofits and, of course, the now quite played out your-text-on-a-tape image generator. Check the article out, it is good fun.