White Knight’s Tale
High
No label: 2021
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The audio tape cassette was invented in 1962 by Lou Ottens, an engineer for Philips, to bypass the clumsiness of reel-to-reel tape. It has two spools of analogue magnetic tape packed inside a protective plastic shell. By some obscure law of audio physics, every third tape will be ‘chewed’ by a cassette player. The sound it reproduces is usually awful, all hiss and flutter and wow. It can simply waste away from age or too much love, the barium ferrite falling away from the plastic every time it passes the tape head. In the audio cassette, solid state chemistry decays into the gaps and cracks of teen romance.

For those of us who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, the cassette was the medium of our childhood and adolescence. It would fit in the pocket of jeans, so you could carry your favourite album to every party. Cassettes were far more portable, if less warm, than vinyl, and tougher than CDs. With the invention of the Walkman in 1979, you could listen to music on long family vacations (just try taking the Discman on a trip over bumpy Bengal roads and hear the music skip trace our civic infrastructure).

• Tags: Dilip Balakrishnan, India, Issue 27, Sudipto Sanyal