You are not wrong to have your doubts about Cassette Store Day. Though there are no proper cassette stores to speak of, there will be events in New York, Chicago, London, Fullerton, Portland, Stockholm and other cities to celebrate the forsaken magnetic medium. It all goes down September 7, which is this Saturday, almost exactly 50 years after the format was invented. I run a label that sells cassettes, am co-hosting the New York event, and understand why you might think this is the biggest trolling of the music world since chillwave. But cassettes-- the whole cassette thing-- are not bullshit. I feel compelled to tell you why.

My reasons for coming around on cassettes are entirely personal, vaguely mathematical, probably nonsensical. The grad students among you will be disappointed to find no discussion of a “living, breathing medium that deteriorates with every play.” Digital has the cassette beat on portability, sharability, durability, ease of recording, etc. Vinyl-- looking past the conspicuous consumption aspect, or the fact that record plant people are largely unreliable assholes-- whups the lowly cassette on nearly all things sonic, speaking personally. The ritual alongside vinyl, of sitting down for the sole purpose of listening to a record, that’s a special thing too.

But there’s no format more human than the cassette. No format wears our stain better. I have not encountered a technology for recorded music whose physics are better suited for fostering the kind of deep and personal relationships people can have to music, and with each other through music. This sounds like nostalgia-- or like a hipster Mitch Albom-- but I don’t think it is. I’m talking about new music, on cassettes, in 2013. No audio format keeps me more focused on listening to the thing itself, without the distraction of having a web browser right in front of me, without the baggage of an ersatz music news cycle, the context upon context, the games of the industry. Music released on cassettes doesn’t feel desperate or needy or Possibly Important. It tends not to be concerned about The Conversation. It resists other people’s meaning. That’s what I like about the cassette. It whittles down our interactions with music to something bare and essential: Two people, sometimes more, trying to feel slightly less alone.

Two stories. I started writing record reviews in 2002. I was in college, I loved new music. Writing about new music was a way to get records before anyone else did. Easy enough. In hindsight, I underestimated how much the simple act of writing about music would rewire my brain and alter my relationship with it. I listened differently than before. The euphemism was “I was listening smartly.” But all that meant was I listened for good sentences. I read music like a text, but wasn’t exactly hearing it anymore. Deliberately misunderstanding something often made the writing better, and I did that a lot too. I abstracted music into ideas about music. Slowly the latter became more important to me than the music itself. I also became an incorrigible asshole, but that’s for a different piece. I never hated music, and I only loved writing about it. But I came to resent how I was listening.

Second story. At the tail end of all that, I started making music again. There was something liberating about how immediate and elemental the whole thing was. No context. Pure id. A rock band when nobody cared about rock bands. We played shows in costumes. Our friends were exceedingly kind. Then people started caring about rock bands. A slew of totally well-meaning people wanted to take us to “the next level” and “build a team” and so on. It was exciting, because for a moment it seemed like this might be a Real Thing. We went on tours with great bands, made our records, played amazing shows. From all angles, things were going super well. But I also felt anxious pretty much all the time. Everything seemed to matter, down to the shoes we wore on stage. I became intimately aware of all the ugly industry machinations that-- I’d rather not shit where I eat. If music had once been a writing exercise, now it was a hunger game, with strategies that changed by the hour and a never-ending supply of supposedly make-or-break moments that might–might–one day land us a mid-afternoon slot at some gobots music festival. The entire setup of the music industry-- from the gross amount of power publicists had, to the convenient myth that musicians need to tour tour tour, next level next level next level-- seemed to benefit everyone except the people making the music. I only saw the wires now. I felt myself becoming cynical.

Cassettes are my detox. A way for me to sidestep everything about music that isn’t music. To get back to the very basic propositions of why I make and listen to music in the first place.

I like the community of labels. It’s small, humble, not exactly well organized. You meet people in a stumbling, haphazard way, which is refreshing in the age of the targeted ad. Steve at Moon Glyph. Tom at Mirror Universe. Emily at Love Lion. Opal Tapes, Trilogy Tapes, Leaving Records. I usually have not heard of the artists, who usually do not have publicists “working” the record. I often buy five or six tapes at a time, whatever releases are available. Sometimes they come right away, other times they take three weeks and two of the cassettes don’t have music on them. I listen to cassettes on a small Sony boombox (with Mega Bass), usually when I do the dishes or get ready in the morning. The music feels like a secret between friends.

Certain kinds of music sound good on cassette. The public perception is that tape is “warm” and “fat," but not all tape is equal, and recording to 2” tape on an old Studer is very different from playing a cassette in a car stereo. In the cassette heyday, people weren’t exactly seeking out cassette releases for their sonic character. Mastering engineers did everything they possibly could to ‘beat’ the cassette, to make the music sound pretty damn close to the original recording despite the ways tape stock can roll off the highs, stuff the low-mids, and hiss above 1khz.

I do all my dubbing on old Sony high-speed duplicators, right in my apartment, and I make my masters on an old Tascam 112. I don’t do a lot of tricks to maintain the high-end frequency response; I like how the music rolls off after 12-15khz, sometimes sooner, and can suddenly feel distant and bottom heavy. The drum hits are sanded down, the metals less aggressive. It’s a subtle effect. Regardless of encoding that music with Dolby Noise Reduction, I still find that I have to push the mixes a bit to stay above the tape noise. And maybe this is what people are responding to when they say tapes are warm and fat – the sound of music just a little bit more compressed than it should be, as the tape struggles to fit all that information in 1/16 of an inch. This isn’t great for atmospheric indie rock. But it’s great for punk, noise, hard techno, rap-- any kind of music that benefits from sounding loud and unruly and uncontainable.

There’s also a metaphysical aspect of cassette releases: The way they affect the musician’s performances during recording. I tell my friends I’ll record their music and we’ll put it out on cassette, and it changes the entire energy of the session. There’s less pressure. It’s less of an event than a vinyl release. It’s “just” a cassette, which is liberating. It lets the id back in the room. There’s a feeling of impunity. It’s not going to cost anyone too much money. Everybody goes for broke.

Speaking of vinyl, which is an expensive gamble for a small label, I like that cassettes are inexpensive. I buy them in bulk from National Audio Company in Missouri for around 50 cents each, and jewel cases are about 22 cents each. Usually I end up doing my own artwork and labels. Runs of 50 or 100 are small by any standard, but if you want to do everything, they take more time than you might think. I don’t like the word “cheap” here, but I like the situation that not having to worry about money puts me in. It’s just a cassette. I don’t feel bad about giving them away to people. Most people I don’t expect them to even listen; I doubt they have cassette players. But I’m interested in those 10 or 15 people who end up trying. Those 10 or 15 people are more interesting to me than Soundcloud plays.

The sonics of cassettes, the low price, the performances they inspire, the inevitably rinky-dink machines people end up playing them on-- all this amounts to its own kind of musical performance with its own set of expectations. People don’t expect perfection from cassettes. They don’t expect transparency, or the feeling of being in the room with the band. They might even expect a little bit of distance. I think a lot about Daft Punk’s “Revolution 909” in that regard. The music is low-passed for the first minute or so-- the thumping and rumbling and undefined sound of standing outside whichever dance club is playing the song inside. The high frequencies are missing, and it creates a longing. That’s an extreme example of my point. But psychologically, if you are inundated with clean and clear and sparkly full spectrum digital music all the time, there’s something beguiling about music that’s happening on the other side of the door. You want to go inside. You never can.

Notice I’ve said nothing about having nostalgia for the physical object, or the experience of listening to music on a Walkman, or some Stockholm Syndrome-like “appreciation” for tape hiss. This has nothing to do with making mixtapes either. Emotionally, syntactically, or otherwise, I never had any issue with the “mix CD.” But mixtapes are another extreme version of what I mean by cassettes bearing our stain well. When you make a cassette from scratch-- the music, the dubbing, the labels, the art, the liners, even the casing-- these little human imperfections accumulate in a way that makes the music mean something different. I can’t think of a format that allows for this kind of thing.

I don’t think we’re in the middle of any long-lasting revival here. It’s a lot of work to put out music on cassettes, and to play music on cassettes. For obvious reasons, we value speed and ease and efficiency in our technology, and require a good qualitative reason for deviating. People value the extremes, and cassettes are not extreme. They are about people: 30, 50, 100 or so. Who are they? Why do they want this? How did they find me? I don’t psychoanalyze. But I like to think that people who adore cassettes are at least partly like me: Enormous fans of new music, overwhelmed by the speed and context and game of it all. People who want a community, not a social network. People who want the music, not the meaning. Cassette people, I like to think, want romance and fantasy. A person in a room, making music, putting it in cassette-shaped bottles for no other reason than these cassette-shaped bottles tend to find the people who need their music the most. Total romance and fantasy, all of this, I admit it. But music could use more of both.

Nick Sylvester co-runs GODMODE, a music company in Brooklyn.