About Cassette Culture
Before the internet, before streaming, before algorithms decided what you should hear next, there was another way.
From the late 1970s, artists and musicians across the world built a self-sustaining underground network using the postal system, blank cassette tapes, and handmade fanzines. They exchanged music, art, and ideas across oceans – all under the radar of mainstream media and the music industry.
Cassette Culture is the podcast that documents that world, told by the people who built it.
How It Started
In 2023, Tom Gibbs of the Infinite Expanse micro-label contacted me about reissuing some early music I’d made with my collaborator, Michael O’Dempsey. The release that came from that was “Kolbe”, a soundtrack we’d recorded for a theatre production of Desmond Forrestal’s tale of faith in the Auschwitz concentration camp during WW2. That reissue led to another, “Premonitions: Underground Cassette Network 1989-90”, a cassette compilation originally released on my SoundImage Tapes label.
“Superb ferric foraging on London’s Infinite Expanse, charting lesser-explored recesses of Slough’s Sound Image label with ambient industrial doings from Downwards-related Antonym and TAL’s Konrad Kraft plus cult shade dwellers M. Nomized, Jack Hurwitz, Omega Ensemble, and many names new to us, at least” – RIYL Spencer Clark, Discrepant, MAAT, Enno Velthuys. BOOMKAT.COM
Getting permissions for “Premonitions” meant tracking down and connecting with artists I hadn’t spoken to in decades. Some I’d known in the 80s and 90s – swapping tapes and letters, and in a few cases bringing them to Windsor for live shows at Windsor Arts Centre, the venue where I worked. Others I’d only ever known by letter, and we were speaking properly for the first time. Those conversations, the stories, the memories, the connections still alive after thirty years made it clear to me that these histories needed to be captured before they were lost.
The Cassette Culture podcast first began as a personal project, rooted in my own experience of the scene. But it has since grown into something wider.
Who We Are
I’m Martin Franklin, a sound artist and audio producer originally from the UK, now based in Australia. I lived through the era we cover in the podcast. I ran the SoundImage Tapes label, exchanged mail with artists across the world, and promoted shows at Windsor Arts Centre for artists including Richard Talbot’s The Butterfly Effect, Omega Ensemble, Ozric Tentacles, and Ring. With artist Carl Stevenson, I staged the mail art exhibitions “Inch By Inch” and “Dead Celebrities” in the venue’s gallery with submissions coming from around the world.
In March 2025, Jerry Kranitz author of “Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit in the Pre-Internet-Age”, the definitive history of the global home-taper movement discovered the podcast, binged every episode, and got in touch. He described it as “the heart and soul of what my book is about.” Even though our voices are often silent in the final episodes, he has been a co-interviewer ever since and his musicologist brain providing a guide to the connections unknown to me. Having the author of the book on the subject as part of the conversation has shaped how we approached the complex themes within Season 2 of the podcast.
A Word From Jerry
Discovering Martin’s Cassette Culture Podcast was a thrill, because here was someone currently digging into the history that had inspired me to write my book. I consider myself an ongoing student of hometaper/cassette culture history, so being brought on board to assist Martin has allowed me to dig into details I was unaware of. Bouncing ideas off of each other as we prepare for interviews and then talking to the subjects face-to-face has been tremendously rewarding and FUN!
And the shows have been going great! I fell hard for Martin’s vision of connections that lead from one to another like a branching tree, producing a continually unfolding ‘story’. I’ve also been enjoying Martin’s approach to interviews, which are not a traditional interview format. This allows us to have relaxed conversations with our subjects. We come to the interviews with prepared questions and topics, but have gotten good at letting the conversations go where they will and each chiming in as thoughts strike us during the interview, drawing out the information we need and often being pleasantly surprised by what the subjects reveal. As for where the show is headed, there’s no grand plan. Things just come up which organically guide the trajectory of the episodes.
Jerry Kranitz
Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit in the Pre-Internet Age
“…acts as an eye-opening introduction, a selection box, and a guidebook into the incredible world of the underground cassette revolution”
Available from:
AMAZON (WORLDWIDE)
SOUNDOHM (EU) | SOLEILMOON (USA) | RESIDENT (UK)
Recognition
Early in Season 1, the British Library Sound Archive contacted us to request permission to preserve the podcast in their collection. The British Library actively archives the culture of the post-punk era, including fanzines, print items, and now the oral histories included in Cassette Culture. In 2025, the show was a finalist in the Independent Podcast Awards in London. Allowing me opportunity to meet (and drink beer) with some of our previous podcast guests who I’d only connected with online. While there, I got to visit some old haunts, and journey out to Portobello Road to record with F*ck Off Records co-founder, Jonathan Barnett.
What We Cover
Two seasons in, we have spoken with artists, label founders, fanzine writers, and broadcasters from the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, the USA, and beyond. We have traced the stories of Cold Spring Records, Staalplaat, Integrated Circuit Records, Deleted Records, Snatch Tapes, Mindscan Tapes and others. We have followed the threads from Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial News newsletter and connected some mind blowing dots.
The episodes are compact, around twenty five minutes, and designed to be evocative and accessible whether you are new to the subject or already deep in it.