FYF Fest spawns cassette creativity

In anticipation of this past weekend’s FYF Fest, event promoters Sean Carlson and Phil Houlting had an idea for a contest. It involved cassette tapes, the anachronistic music medium thought to have died in the late 1990s.

In honor of the creative, personal means in which music obsessives shared new sounds before the rise of MP3s, iTunes and Spotify, the two decided to offer a prize to the person who submitted the best mix recorded on a cassette. The winner would get $500, five pairs of tickets to the festival and the broadcast of his or her mix between acts. The rules were pretty simple. Make a mix, include song titles, be creative about packaging.

Carlson said he expected a hundred or so, but when the deadline hit, his office was filled with more than 600 mixtapes, and participants had taken his instructions to heart. There were not only hand-designed cassette boxes and J-cards (the inserts on which song titles are written) but entries packaged in wild configurations and tapes hand-painted as though they were canvases. One tape, called “I Love My Leather Jacket,” was outfitted with its ownconstruction-paper leather jacket. Another came affixed to a cardboard Godzilla, with the cassette in the belly.

Standing in front of the bounty at his Eagle Rock home, Carlson said he thinks the slow pace of working with the vintage medium inspired people to dig in. Though one can no longer order cassette decks, apparently basements and closets throughout America still house working units.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect mixtape,” said Carlson. “It’s always about the mood you’re in and what’s going on in your life.” He added that the contest opened his eyes to the tastes of his audience. “Some people made a fun tape, some people made a breakup tape. There are quite a few letters in there, and you can see how deep people get, and how much they put into it.”

He picked out one entry: The first side was all songs in the key of A, and the B side featured all songs in B. Another packaged a cassette within the cut-out pages of a vintage book. There was a bag lunch filled with a tape, napkins, and a diner bill with the track listing.

Carlson hopes that the contest will spawn a “slow mixtape” movement. “I really hope it prompts the kids who made these tapes to want to make tapes for their friends and realize how much it captures a moment in their life.”

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randall.roberts@latimes.com