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"Filmmaker and Filmmaker contributor Alix Lambert is a guest producer on this week's Theory of Everything, where she learns that it's not just hipsters causing a revival in the audio cassette format but prisoners. Indeed, for most prisoners, cassettes are the only music delivery device they're allowed. Listen to her episode, "Analog Time," embedded here, as Lambert talks to some incarcerated men for whom cassette tapes are an escape, a salve, and even a medium of exchange."

Great example of a technology (or tech failure) leading to new art forms: "The rebajada was created at a party when the Radson [a brand of amplifier] began to sound slow because the turntable's motor ground down. We were scared cause of what happened, but then after this accident people began to ask for the rebajado version [rebajado means lowered or cut down in some way, i.e. slowed down], so we recorded Volume One, Two, Three and one hundred more. Thank god we have the original cassettes. The first cassette was released in 1992 and we sold it at the Puente del Papa market by the Santa Catarina river. My wife began to sell three or four cassettes with a little table and sound system, and thank god we made a lot."

"Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, and Beach House. Over time, the stars and hits have changed and the formats have evolved as well, from vinyl to CDs to MP3s. In recent years, however, the label has started releasing new albums on a medium few thought would ever see a comeback: the cassette. But there's one big user group that never entirely stopped using the old school technology. The United States prison system has the largest prison population in the world and many of its inmates listen to their music on tape. For this group, cassettes aren't necessarily the cheapest or hippest way to listen to music; in some cases, it's the only way."

"Years ago I unearthed a case full of cassettes in my parents closet. I'd been saving a certain one for the right time. A recorded letter, "To Ron" written on the label. It would have been sent to my father in Costa Rica from his family in Ohio. Upon pressing play I hear who I think is my grandmother as the initial hiss of the tape settles and soon the voice of my young uncle. My Mother and Father met while they were both serving as Mennonite missionaries in Costa Rica during the 1970s. He sang love songs outside her window. He rode an old Yamaha motorcycle up through Central America. He loved to tell those stories. While on my third stay in the psychiatric hospital I started sketching out a short piece. The new season of Twin Peaks was airing at the time and the adult unit I was housed in is known as "Lodge". It was during my fourth and most recent stay that my father fell ill and passed away. I experienced his last days through second-hand phone calls in my own hospital room miles apart. Such a physical disconnect and heightened reality complicates my ability to grieve. I returned home and had to finish the piece. The sample finally had a purpose."

"The music on Quartz Locked, Deep City Wandering, was sourced from non-musical, professional electronic appliances recorded back in 1987 and preserved on a C-90 cassette until this day. The original sounds were mainly derived from two electronic devices: a hacked, roadside traffic signal data logger, on the one hand, and a physician's pager, on the other. Wires were soldered to various parts of the data logger's motherboard and connected to a tape recorder's audio inputs, emitting a rich assortment of glitch sounds, static noises and buzzing a-plenty. A physician's pager, smuggled from the local hospital, was similarly hacked and manipulated in order to produce high frequency buzzing noises with striking modulation/demodulation effects. Both devices were eventually plugged together to create additional random interference patterns, while occasional tape manipulation and varispeed effect were also applied during the recording process."

"If you asked me when the history of bootleg music began, I would have assumed it arrived with the invention of the cassette tape, something small, inexpensive and portable that was easily duplicated in any garage from deck A to deck B. In reality, widespread bootlegging dates back even further, to the 1950s in the Soviet Union where music lovers, desperate for banned Western tunes, devised an ingenious way to print their own records. The only problem was the scarcity of vinyl."

Solo. Based on a recording of a Salvadoran boy burying his father. Bob Ostertag did not simply create a political piece but a musical reality, in which sampling technology is used in a significant way for the first time. The music encircles reality, decomposes it into music and recomposes it until reality is no longer able to escape. It is this clarity that makes Sooner or Later great music, a music that has something to do with life again. -- Die Zeit