With AI on his mind and joyous sound in his ears, Daryl Worthington dives into his 20 favourite cassettes of 2025, finding the world’s tape conveyed eccentric undergrounds remain in brilliant form

My fear when writing this column is that all I’m really doing is training AI so that soon it will deliver hotter takes about cassettes than I ever could. Maybe it’s web induced paranoia, but some blurbs on promoters’ websites and social media for artists I’ve covered here are uncannily close to uncited quotations of text I wrote. It has the fingerprints of ChatGPT, or perhaps humans cutting, pasting and collaging without considering the source, which is suspiciously close to what AI does anyway. It’s not clear who in the chain is doing it and I’m not going to name names – but some of these artists and institutions publicly espouse their DIY values. Is AI DIY? It’s a question that gets more complicated the longer you look at it.

This isn’t about being self-righteous about people saving time writing bios, or trying to establish rules for copyright and citation when talking about a scene where creative borrowing and détournement is often a path to astounding creativity. The economics for any artist, promoter or label in the underground are such that corners have to be cut, although they can be cut with consideration. But it’s not just text, I’ve seen AI used to make DIY gig posters, album artwork and more, and this gets to the issue. Most people involved in underground music are there for something other than financial security, so it’s worth thinking about what gets lost in the pursuit of efficiency. AI often seems to take on the work people actually enjoy. Losing your job to a machine is one thing, losing your passion is another.

AI has woven itself so far into daily reality the humble cassette community hasn’t escaped, even if it’s not prevalent in the music itself (There’s only one release in the following list that engages with AI, although it’s really about gnomes). Questions of copyright and ownership are complicated in some of this column’s purview – sampling, plunderphonics, turntablism. Heck, an intrinsic part of the cassette’s mythology is using them to share music between friends like an unnetworked, portable plastic Napster, but homemade mix tapes tended to have track listings, if you taped off the radio you probably heard the DJ name the track. Elsewhere, the underground has a history of hacking and reappropriating technology, whether to make music, or to broadcast it. How does AI fit into that? Where are the lines drawn between borrowing, stealing and appropriating?

The thing that’s always separated the underground from the mainstream, the bit that can’t be co-opted or commodified, is its ethics. The evading of sinister corporations and ultra-competitive approaches to the world. Tellingly, the majority of music this column covers isn’t available on Spotify, a trend that existed long before the company’s CEO invested in AI-powered war machines.

Samplers, tape decks and pirate radio can be directed by humans who choose where they’re borrowing from and the ethics of doing so. AI just extracts, from creativity and the environment. It’s not like sampling – a comparison made in defense of AI – but it does further the most contentious aspects of it, taking from the underprivileged for the privileged without offering a clear culprit to hold to account. The cassette underground puts AI into relief, because some of the practices involved are close to what AI does. Thinking about the differences is important. Hopefully it leads to more solid ideas about the stakes of AI beyond resorting to arguments based on flimsy, potentially problematic notions of humanity and authenticity – the idea there’s some human aura we’ll always be able to detect.

Which is to say, Happy Holidays! Below, you’ll find an unranked, alphabetical list of 20 of my favourite tapes from 2025, some of which I wrote about previously, others I missed. I’ve jettisoned the tape label of the year for 2025. Fax in if you want it back for 2026.

Peruvian artist Ayarwhaska, aka Valentín Causillas Pease, recorded *Dendritas Oscilantes *solo in his bedroom. Through hurls of harsh noise and film samples, sneering garage rock and crust punk it diverts into ravaged jungle-like beats on ‘Desasosiego’, before crawling back out into mid-paced, irreparably damaged rock. The whole tape is never predictable and never less than extreme. Bathed in so much noise the distortion becomes a message all by itself.

Named after an Austrian supermarket chain, Billa Ensemble includes Edinburgh-based Michal Fundowicz, who runs the Molt Fluid label and makes music as Turmeric Acid, Bucharest-based Dan Michiu, who runs Beach Buddies records, and Vienna-based Marie Vermont and The Concept Horse – who are also the duo IEOGM. Live at Cafe Oto, captures the off-kilter jam band in full flight, a chewed and mangled concoction of eel-like guitar, cassette samples, contact mics and electronics doused in cranky whirs. Improvised music as slow-dispersing Pollockian splat, a brilliant mess of transfixing, erratic lines.

Ten months after it was first released, *DOG FM remains disarmingly bizarre. Sat navs, a disturbingly proximate canine, glowing synths and intrusions of sparking poetry, many of the sounds here are recognisable, it all seems like it could have been recorded in the backseat of a car, but the resulting constellation is anything but familiar. Eccles and Chapman *simulate a waking dream.

Content Provider is a new alias of Dali De Saint Paul, who might be familiar to readers of this column through the projects EP/64 and Harrga. Content Provider sees her turn to producing tracks, recruiting fellow Bristolians to take the mic as well as singing herself. Oscillating between claustrophobic hip hop, pounding synth punk and heatsick broken beats, the album is both fleet footed and loaded with fathoms of pressure to hold us through the apocalyptic heatwaves to come.

This duo delivered two of my favourite concerts of 2025. Meanwhile, Cunningham has played on a slew of great tapes this year – her solo album *Almost – Not Exactly *and Engine Songs in duo with Caius Williams. Cooper heads the band Modern Nature (which Cunningham is also in). *Pond Songs *captures the sonic macramé that unfurls when Cooper and Cunningham duet, guitars sneaking around each other in elegant knots. It’s simultaneously no frills guitar music and quietly thrillingly guitar music. Walking the tightrope of melodic and atonal, they generally steer clear of genre markers, two predominantly clean guitars staying in an open space that never feels deliberately abstract or unwelcoming. Cunningham and Cooper lay mesmerising twangs, plucks and strums that feel like they could roam forever without ever repeating.

En Creux is London-based Taiwanese artist Lucia H Chung, who works with no-input mixing. On *Circumference *she douses the bleeps, crackles and whinnies of feedback in reverbs and fierce distortion to generate cataclysmic explosions, volatile rhythms and jolts of disorientating proximity. The album alternates between sounding like it’s bouncing off a vast metal container and being broadcast from inside your own head. On closing pair ‘Ferre 0163’ and ‘Ferre 0140’, it’s both simultaneously, En Creux re-ordering the scaffolding of inner and outer architecture.

The Wuhan-based label Tailnia has built a formidable discography of radical music this year. *Cycles Of Virtual Lines *by Seoul-based Choi Hyeok explores virtual feedback, Choi making a computerised equivalent to mixer feedback. It leads to intricate matrices where volatile surges wrestle with the grid-based framework of computer composition. The whole tape is a chirruping, chittering architecture where spectral fragments lurk in the background and pulsations of low frequency provide unstable anchors. Although achieved through different means, it brings to mind Pan Sonic, Choi having a similar knack for making mesmerising labyrinths from razored edges.

Yan Jun plays voice and breath, Eric Wong plays sine wave and white noise on *Rely. *There’s an eerie intimacy between human and machine generated, while the tape creates a space where each sound is both remarkably subtle and arrestingly present all at once. Listening makes you acutely aware of your ears’ working and how they respond to sound and space.

This album has had a vinyl release since I wrote about the tape back in May, which would normally make it ineligible, but I’m bending the rules. Indonesian duo Kuntari unleash heart jolting blasts of pounding drums, wounded coronet and fiendishly heavy guitar, it’s a formula they’ve explored previously and refined to stunning effectiveness here. *Lahar *is a Javanese term for pyroclastic flows, an apt name for this relentlessly awe-inspiring music.

*Kwashiorkor Presents… *collects two works, *We Are Numberless *and *Reliving The Past, *by Kwashiorkor (sometimes abbreviated to K+), a collective active in the US between 1978 and 1988 whose members exchanged tapes of home-brewed sounds through the post, sharing ideas to develop a group practice. The first tape collects individual recordings from across the network, roaming through tactile cut ups, tape deck country rock and a deluge of wobbly sound experiments. Where the first tape collects curios from the individuals, the second (Reliving The Past) slips into the collective’s mail art groupthink with two sidelong collages of hiss, lo fi music and tape mangled voices. Where tape one feels like a urtext for the DIY underground, tape two captures what made *Kwashiorkor *special, a group of DIY experimenters uniting towards a common peculiar goal.

Glasgow trio L wrote their parts for My Sister’s Baby without listening to what the others had done. The tape is inevitably unpredictable, babbling crescendos and riotous collapses arriving without rhyme, reason or clear delineation, while the spoken vocals exist in perpetually peculiar framing. *My Sister’s Baby *is wild and chaotic, yet whether through kismet, fluke or clairvoyance it never sounds disjointed, the three musicians seemingly have an understanding so well ingrained they don’t need to hear each other to make this truly unique band roll.

On *·i· *Clara Lai plays electric piano and synthesiser, Barbara Togander plays turntables and vocals. Opener ‘T-i-d’ unleashes a stream of multilingual words which growling synth wonkily punctuates. On ‘Estira’ back spinning vinyl weaves through babbling keys and queasy drones. The tape moves through phases, the pair swinging between frenzied and meditative, burbling and elegant as icicle-like piano flows into elastic sound poetry pulled from throat and decks, shards of classical music and flickers of mutant grooves. There’s a virtuosic weirdness to the whole thing, Lai and Togander finding pockets to stretch and fill with unexpected sound.

Zhang Meng has a deeply rooted connection to the sheng, he’s played it in orchestras for more than 20 years and his father was a professional player. *Noising Sheng *strives to extend the instrument’s horizons, documenting a live set where Zhang explores and twists the sheng’s natural tone. Moving from intricate, minimalist matrixes into waves of shimmering dissonances, it often moves like it’s electronic but is in fact totally acoustic, the only augmentation being Zhang playing against a pre-recorded tape of the sheng’s “typically lyrical sound”. It’s a remarkable, real-time display of what happens when an instrument with histories and expectations embedded into it is approached with convention-defying technique.

*Jazz Club *marks the first full length release from Marseille-based producer and DJ Moesha 13. Sewn together mixtape style, the two sides bound through pounding beats, cyborg dancehall and mutated, tresillo-like rhythms. She pulls beats from across the globe, but for all the pivots from smashed percussion into soaring, pitch-warped anthems it never sounds disjointed, the flow held through these tracks frankly miraculous considering all the points it passes through. Contrasting the frenzy and dancefloor shaking rhythms are moments of shimmering, strident synthesis and glowing texture, as Moesha 13 provides multiple lines of elevation.

Rougarou is named after a werewolf in Cajun and Creole folklore. The project’s self-titled debut is a black metal album fused with the triangles, washboards, fiddle and piano of traditional Cajun music, encapsulated most potently in the blistering interpretation of ‘La Chanson De Mardi Gras’ that closes the tape. Far more than a gimmicky genre mash up, Rougarou builds atmospheric vortexes of howling sound through overlaps creepy and ecstatic.

Seoul-based Jin Sangtae used modified mechanical hard drives as acoustic/electronic percussion on Redox, Tokyo-based Takahiro Kawaguchi used dripping water from infusion containers splashing onto a smartphone running a music app. An ear-teasing quality flows through the whole tape. At points you can distinguish Kawaguchi and Sangtae’s sounds, but usually they meld into overlaps of mechanical friction, electrical interference and trickling water, evoking static scenes held together by persistent motion.

As she explained in an interview with tQ earlier this year, Ursula Sereghy’s intricate, multicoloured music isn’t about escapism. *Cordial *dwells on notions of home, the tape’s fantastic vistas exploring what it could feel like and encouraging us to consider the reality currently offered to us. The hyperreal textures and dazzling geometries in her music feel like they’re sprouting from a parallel universe for a reason, *Cordial *is a sanctuary that nurtures such jubilant alternatives.

Both Shmu and Galen Tipton (as DJ Galen) released genre-resistant solo tapes in 2025. DewCLAWS saw them combine in spectacular fashion, laying kaleidoscopic bangers which are both packed with vibrant stimuli and light as a feather. From the combination of relentless ear worm and audacious autotuned-warped sound design on ‘Gimme That Chance ☹’ (feat. Claudia Hinsdale & Ko. T.C.) to the cascading slow build on ‘🎆🌌🌉Fantasia Hyperion 🌉🌌🎆’, their radical technopop evokes incursions from ecstatic alternative realities.

On *Orbweaver *Zosha Warpeha plays hardanger d’amore – a fiddle-like instrument with origins in Norway – and voice. Mariel Terán plays pífano, sikura chuli, moseño salliwa, chajchas and tarka – flutes from indigenous Andean cultures. Their tools are steeped in histories from different sides of the globe, but across the six improvisations on this tape they build a vibrant new shared language, their instinctive interactions producing a rich dialogue alive to the moment.

Broadly paraphrasing, 乃٥乃 & Ougdol’s GN speculates on how mischievous gnomes could be a metaphor to imagine what’s behind computer and AI glitches. The phrase ‘gnome in the shell’, riffing off ‘ghost in the machine’, was a launching off point for the duo and it captures the peculiar, slightly sinister, oddly playful folkloric confabulations that form in these digital mirages.