Cassette Culture

This morning I received a cassette in the post. I know vinyl is making a comeback (of sorts), but cassettes? Apart from fogeys like me, who has cassette-players these days?  They take me back... to Boots, BASF and TDK Ds which were pretty lo-fi. Memorex (with their fancy cases and Pete Murphy ads) were OK, but my staple was a good old TDK AD C90, an album a side.
I don't think I ever have had a proper cassette release of a major album (except, bizarrely, PFM's Photos of Ghosts which my sister bought back from Italy). But in the early 80s DIY cassette labels (including my own, YHR) were all over the place, pushing out the weird & the wonderful and the wretched. And then there were the compilations and mix tapes which joined football and beer as top bloke hobby. I still have boxes of the stuff in storage somewhere; in fact I even have a caseful here in Beijing.
And what was the cassette I received today? Wicked Messenger's very dark & dreamy Infinite Presence - which sits nicely next to a TG Live at the Architectural Association and Conrad Schnitzler's Black Cassette.