15 or so years ago, compact cassettes curiously resurged in fashion as a favoured format, as clusters of boutique tape labels sprang up throughout Europe and North America to release independent musical recordings. A dedicated society of tape collecting ensued.

Cassette culture in the 2010s followed a throwback to vinyl records a few years earlier, which CDs had rendered obsolete in the 1990s but which reemerged as a technology of fascination in the subsequent decade for a niche market of audiophiles and residual media aficionados.

The explanation at the time was that consumers who had come of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, during the era when vinyl was the dominant musical format, were then entering into middle age and upward social mobility and were possessed with a sense of nostalgia for the records that they had collected as kids. Logically, cassettes followed suit for children of the 1980s and ‘90s.

Less logical, though, was the fact that cassette tapes were never considered high-fidelity media. While they were analogue in nature, as opposed to CDs, DATs, and the more recent proliferation of digital file formats and online streaming services, tapes, even during their heyday, were neither a prevailing standard format nor did they provide listeners the best audio quality.

Tapes were characteristically plagued by hiss and a high noise floor, imbuing their recordings with a murky and muddied aesthetic. Tapes degraded quickly. And their playback devices — primarily Walkmans endowed with auto-reverse — frequently chewed up and mangled them.

Their only benefit was that music listeners could record onto them, making compact cassette tapes the first widely available and comparatively affordable home-recording technology.

It was this feature, perhaps, that endeared cassette tapes to their proper generation.

However, nostalgia for a formative consumer format is no longer the only explanation for why tapes, specifically, have weathered other retro boom-and-bust cycles, as millennials and zoomers who never collected cassettes the first time around have steadfastly maintained a desire for them.

“It’s so counterproductive, in a way, to home-dub a small batch of tapes,” admits Frédérique Duval who along with partner Christian Richer has just launched the Verdun-based cassette tape-dedicated imprint, Isohyet.

The name, as esoteric as the format itself, defines a line on a map connecting places that share the same amount of rainfall. Appropriately, idiosyncratic and hyper-specific connection is the philosophy that animates Duval and Richer’s new label.

“A couple of years ago during the pandemic, we made online friendships with a lot of these people who were passionate about tape culture and music,” explains Duval, who produces ambient electronic music under the pseudonym Fumerolles.

“We met this guy in Vancouver named Jamie Tolagson who runs a label called Hotham Sound. His project is called Mount Maxwell, and he reached out to me to re-release my first album, Nuit Jaune. And we discovered this passionate music community on the West Coast, and we made online friendships with a lot of these people. And we realized there was a need for more people releasing this music. They can’t release everything in B.C. and in the West Coast of the U.S.”

Richer, who has recorded for more than ten years as Element Kuuda, has plenty of label experience, having founded the Bedroom Pop-oriented Kinnta Records in 2012, releasing well-received albums by Chairs and The Haiduks.

“I was trying to get into the Indie music terrain, along with other labels like Planet of the Tapes and Fixture Records. But I had no management skills,” Richer confesses. “I felt like I’d failed, but I didn’t fail. I made it. I did something.”

Duval and Richer bonded immediately, both creatively and romantically, over long-form music bingeing sessions. “That’s what we did when we first met,” says Duval, “spending 12 hours straight listening to music, just saying, ‘that was interesting, now you put something else on,’ listening to music and talking.”

“We came from kind of different musical backgrounds,” Richer says. “But they’re connected. Frédérique knew a bunch of stuff that I didn’t, and we discovered realms of music together.”

Richer’s father was a “Beatle head” who studied electronics and encouraged Richer’s early childhood attraction to both music and technology.

“My first tape was Michael Jackson’s Bad,” Richer recalls. “It smelled super plastic, and it sounded so good. My dad dubbed Thriller for me, and I played the tape on repeat. I couldn’t get over how good it sounded. Later on, I discovered why — because of Quincy Jones and all the musicians on it. But it was just naturally in me to listen to that stuff.”

Duval’s parents owned a computer shop and papeterie on the North Shore of Montreal and Duval emerged into adolescence listening to electronic music from an unlikely source. “In Zellers in the ‘90s, you had the New Age panel with all these albums,” Duval says. “My first albums were those. Ten Celtic songs. Ten dolphin songs. That’s probably how I discovered electronic music,” she laughs.

Both Duval and Richer began seriously collecting music in their teens and recognised the transcendent power of a genre-agnostic approach.

“I was into grunge in the ‘90s and I bashed dance music at some point,” Richer remembers. “You know, you chose grunge, and you didn’t listen to anything else. But there was a record shop I went to with a guy with a mullet and he was super into Prog Rock. He was super sweet and not condescending at all, and he opened my mind to stuff I didn’t know. He wasn’t afraid to express his opinion.”

Duval and Richer recently joined forces to collaborate on a new musical project called Preoptic Ridge, performing twice together in 2024, at Ateliers Belleville and Casa del Popolo. Currently, they are recording an LP set for release this year and are readying a batch of albums to be put out through Isohyet, beginning with Lush Vegetation, an aptly titled album by Vancouver-based musician J.T. Gladysz, and local electronic artist Emmanuel Cameron aka Yunam’s Weightless.

“We want to release people who would otherwise have a hard time releasing stuff physically,” Richer says. “Digital music has its advantages. You can listen to it at any second and own it — or not. But the physical thing is more permanent.”

Although Duval and Richer hold no illusions that launching a cassette imprint in the streaming era will be easy going. “It’s a money pit, let’s face it,” Richer concedes. “Releasing people’s tapes is a money pit. Especially now when butter is $75 at the supermarket.”

We might diagnose cassette tape culture as a condition the pop music critic Simon Reynolds coined “retromania,” or the author Grafton Tanner termed “foreverism,” or what the late philosopher Mark Fisher dubbed “hauntology,” or what I will call “future nostalgia.”

Not just a longing for a previous time when the future seemed more optimistic, but also a recognition that the present, no matter how grim it may seem now, is an age for which we will inevitably feel nostalgic in the future. Technological obsolescence is itself obsolete as consumer products we might once have conceived as ephemeral prove to be remarkably enduring.

Still, Isohyet for Duval and Richer is ultimately about an appreciation for the music, the intentionality of making the physical object, and cultivating reciprocal relationships with fellow collectors.

“It’s one thing to do this for the ritual of it, just doing something carefully,” says Duval. “But the act of doing DIY tapes for a label today, this is a statement in this Spotify world. We feel like this is the best contribution we can give to the community. Because we’re hermits. We don’t go out a lot. We don’t have the social energy to build big events. But we have the stamina to do objects and do it with care and love — and archive it properly. That’s what we can give back.”◼︎

_{Cover image: Frédérique Duval and Christian Richer at their Verdun home and Isohyet headquarters. Photographed for NicheMTL.}