Top Tape: Dublab DJs 'Spin' Cassettes at Calling All Kids Friday

The record will be sitting this one out.

One of LA Weekly's favorite clubs, Calling All Kids, will be teaming up with one of our favorite audio institutions, Dublab, to host "Top Tape," a free Friday event billed as "a night of magnetic music" all played from cassette.

Manning the literal decks will be "the Dublab tape team" -- Frosty, Matthewdavid, Turquoise Wisdom, Grant Capes (of Echo Curio), Nanny Cantaloupe, and Suzanne Kraft -- playing "their favorite cassingles, mixtapes, and cassette-spooled albums." According to Matthewdavid, C.A.K.'s co-founder, there will also be a separate tape deck on hand recording random moments throughout the night direct from the DJ mixer. The resulting one-of-a-kind Top Tape mixtape will be raffled off at the end of the night (tickets will be included with the price of a drink).

For more on the march of the cassette, take a look at Randall Roberts's recent piece for the print edition of LA Weekly, which includes mention of Matthewdavid's own tape-friendly label, Leaving Records. Here's an excerpt:

"It's been coming for a few years, and is generating a little bit of conversation. Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and scribe Byron Coley just wrote, via Arthur Mag, that "some of the best music/sounds is happening on small cassette labels." We've been tracking it for the past decade, and humbly consider ourselves to be experts in the field: as the format was being relegated to history's dustbin, we were on the jury of the 2003 BEIGE World Cassette Jockey Championships in Chicago, and still consider that participation to be one of our great achievements. Here in LA, Family Bookstore on Fairfax has a nice little cassette selection, and matthewdavid's great Leaving Records imprint has started issuing cassettes."