Just as vinyl has seen an unexpected surge in popularity among lovers of music packaging in the past decade, the cassette format has gained a surprising amount of cachet in recent years. On Oct. 25, Of Montreal will release its entire catalog in the form of a cassette box set packaged inside an actual wooden, intricately ornamented box.
Presumably there’s an audience out there for something like this, though Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes isn’t part of it. “I can understand the cassette thing, but I don’t really feel that connected to it,” Barnes told Pitchfork. "It's like the CD for me—I don’t really like that tactile quality. Plastic just annoys me. It's easy to romanticize the past. That sort of goes hand in hand with vinyl as well. Having a connection to a physical object is really cool. At some point, people will be nostalgic about CDs, too. It's just human nature.”
Barnes also talked about the next Of Montreal album, Paralytic Stalks, which he’s currently working on. “It’s a bit more esoteric, and it’s probably not something everybody’s going to like,” he said. “I can see a lot of people having problems with it, but I can also see a lot of people loving it.” So there you have it: You will love the next Of Montreal record. Or you might possibly not love it.