I RECENTLY WENT to a show at Balazo Gallery that offered a mix tape exchange box. I brought my own CD-R mix and ended up walking home with a noise mix titled White Hand, dubbed over an old classical violin tape. I've been thinking a lot about how many CD-Rs are going to end up in landfills, while cassettes can keep being recycled until their spools snap.

Lately I've found more reasons to brush off my tape deck than to purchase an iPod. I may have an inherent bias toward tape, since I came of age in the era between the decline of vinyl and the rise of CDs, and my formative music purchases were on cassette. It can't just be nostalgia driving the new wave of tape-only labels: economy of scale may be what's behind the fast, cheap, and out-of-control output, which has unearthed some of the most potent noise burblings on American soil. Seattle's Since 1972 (www.pinktoes.net/since72.htm) is run by Andrew Demter, a kid in his early twenties who has done tapes for Wolf Eyes, Yellow Swans, and Climax Golden Twins. I thought about calling this piece "Tapes Are the New MP3," which is a joke, but in a way, this movement is a step back from the virtual space of digital files, back to the romance of artifacts.

Mike Donovan of Folding Cassettes (www.dialrecords.com) agrees, writing via e-mail, "For an old format it's amazing how durable and competitive it is with established and pretty fully developed CD-R technology." Folding Cassettes is devoted exclusively to tape releases, and its most recent titles are a tour split featuring Big Techno Werewolves and Hospitals and a compilation made with Chris Johanson for the latter's show at Vedanta Gallery in Chicago. The compilation, Solo Show Solo Soul Sounds of Souls Share, includes tracks from established artists like Kit Clayton, Octis, and Metalux, as well as some newcomers.

Donovan hit a wall with his "legitimate" label, Dial, which had put out numerous CDs and limited lathe-cut records from Prosthetic Guitars, Blectum from Blechdom, OST, and Rocket Science and the Nigger Loving Faggots. "For a while I was struggling with trying to get Dial more and more off the ground and found that there were certain aspects of running a label in the traditional sense that I just couldn't get comfortable with," he writes.

While Dial still exists as a Web site archiving its back catalog, Donovan found the cassette format freed up the creative side of running a label: "All my hesitation could be laid to rest but my desire to work with people at making and packaging music could continue unabated. In fact, things could be sped up." With less than $20, Donovan can do a tape run that's fully realized 48 hours after its conception.

The tape underground also places an emphasis on handmade packaging, often mixing color printing, screen-printing, and stencils. The most distinctive packaging I've seen has come from Northampton, Mass., label Yeay! Cassettes (yeay.suchfun.net), run by Neil Young, a.k.a. Kayleener. The label began in 1991 as a high school project "making collages from great pictures in Atari video game manuals," and the visual element is still dominant for Young – releases by his group, Fat Worm of Error, feature a three-color stencil with the band's Pac Man eyeball motif in full force.

Although Yeay! Cassettes dabbles in CD-Rs, Young wants to maintain a hand-packaging aesthetic. "Currently most CD packaging schemes look pretty nasty, and when it comes to CD-R releases, most folks really put out sloppy, lazy product," Young writes in an e-mail. "Tapes are warmer, linear, and looping. There can be many listed tracks, but there is that media-based concept of the 'side' and the program must flow as a side," as opposed to the skip-to-your-favorite-track ease of digital formats. Young lists other advantages of the second-class audio format: "They can reside in your car stereo, get booted around the kitchen floor, or be this thing you have to focus in on at the hi-fi, like when you listen to a great LP."

There would be little point in valorizing cassettes on their own, much as there's little point in analog Luddites talking smack about Pro Tools, if the music were easy to ignore. In the case of Young's own Bromp Treb project (a cut-and-paste noise piss take on hip-hop) and Fat Worm of Error's deconstructed rock fragments (which include a distended version of the "Popcorn" song), the content fits the format. And like many lo-fi revolutionaries, Young, Donovan, and Demter are working within technological limitations to focus on the belief in the art itself, unburdened by the weight of commercial viability.

"Still no money in it," Young concludes, "and that's probably why tape labels are so righteous in the first place – it's pure love." (George Chen)