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’The weird uncle,’ the cassette tape, is being welcomed back into American boutiques, thrift-stores and is even being used again by Djs.

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LOS ANGELES — When the vinyl LP began its modest but highly publicized commercial comeback a few years ago, the format felt easy to love again. With sprawling artwork, pristine sound quality and the adoring ritual of flipping album sides, its return united young bohemia and their boomer parents alike.

Not so for the lowly cassette tape. To mainstream music fans who spent the ’80s detangling spools with a paper clip, listening to heat-damaged sounds warble out of the speakers and blindly fast-forwarding and reversing to get to a favorite song, cassettes might be the most despised, instantly discarded and fidelity-challenged medium to ever vie for mass popularity.

“Tapes remind me of Dollar Stores and K-Mart,” said Chris Jahnle, the 22-year-old co-founder of Kill/Hurt, a new Hollywood record label specializing in small batches of outre noise-rock released on cassettes dubbed in his living room. He’s no Luddite — Jahnle works in a major label’s digital marketing department, and co-founder Katrina Bouza just wrapped up an internship at the hotly tipped L.A. indie label IAMSOUND Records. They know that “tape is like the weird uncle no one talks about,” Jahnle said.

And yet across pockets of America and especially among shoestring record labels, DJs and boutique stores in Los Angeles, this weird uncle is again a welcome guest. A tiny but busy tape-based music culture is growing from roots in economic necessity, thrift-store crate-digging and, yes, a pride in being difficult for its own sake.

But cassettes also carry a different nostalgia, one not tracked by SoundScan. They evoke high-school mixes from nascent crushes and trips to the beach soundtracked by sun-bleached tunes recorded off the radio. The emotional archaeology of trawling through shoeboxes of cracked cassettes has a resonance that iTunes doesn’t offer.

After all, Jahnle said, “Mp3s sound terrible anyways, so why not have something that sounds terrible that you can hold?”

Originally marketed for dictation and portable voice recording, mass-produced cassettes became a format for distributing music in the United States in the ’60s. Their notoriously sub-par fidelity improved throughout the ’70s, and with the rise of the portable Sony Walkman in the 1980s and as automobiles came equipped with standard cassette decks, the tape became a second viable mainstream format alongside vinyl LPs and later compact discs. (The less said about the 8-track tape of the 1970s, the better.)

Like Mp3s, tapes compensated for their relatively degraded sound quality with portability and, notoriously, the ability for fans to record and share music. This sparked a small panic — now impossibly quaint — among record labels worried that home taping would gut retail record sales.

But even as the compact disc usurped it as a mass medium — as early as 2007, pre-recorded cassette albums constituted only 0.05 percent of all SoundScan-reported album sales, and in 2009 only 34,000 were sold — those convenient features kept the cassette alive at the musical margins.

For artists in fringe genres such as noise and garage-rock who want to document their music but only expect to sell a few copies, home-dubbed tape remains an economical godsend. By trawling eBay with a few hundred bucks, an artist or novice label head can buy used duplication equipment and bang out a hundred copies over a weekend.

“Tape fits in with a belief system of how intimate music is made,” said Britt Brown, co-founder with his wife, Amanda Brown, of Eagle Rock-based Not Not Fun, which releases much of their catalog of psychedelic, noisy rock by bands such as Pocahaunted and Robedoor on cassette. “And I’ve never seen such voraciousness as in people who want a limited-run tape.”

Yet as with vinyl, there is an upper threshold of sales that tape culture will support. You’d be hard pressed to find a store in 2010 selling new cassette decks, even if Los Angeles has a unique advantage in this culture, where unlike in New York, most local fans of squalling noise-rock also own junky ’90s sedans with tape decks.

The format, however, will probably stay resigned to Internet mail order. Duplication companies still in the business work mainly for Christian audiences dubbing sermons or academic presses printing lectures.

“Tape orders have definitely picked up from almost nothing in the last couple years, and it’s been almost entirely indie bands,” said Michael McKinney, the president of M2 Communications, the Pasadena-based CD and DVD duplication plant. M2 issues between 6,000 and 10,000 tapes a month at around 70 cents apiece, McKinney said, a number clearly down from its ’80s heyday of hundreds of thousands but up from its ’90s and ’00s doldrums of virtually zero.