- Adele Nicholas
- The second cassingle in the Impossible Colors Club
Growing up, Adele Nicholas loved getting tapes in the mail. She’d order them and wait, and eventually they’d come, sometimes packaged with extra stickers, buttons, or patches. “That’s what I loved about getting tapes as a kid,” she says. “You get this thing in the mail, and it might come with something you weren’t expecting. Even if it’s tiny, it feels really special.” The founder of Chicago-based microlabel Impossible Colors now mails out her own tapes, filled with the music she makes as Axons and with her band Puritan Pine. The label’s new cassingles series, the Impossible Colors Club, ships split singles from local bands to subscribers every month.
An analog, mail-order tape-subscription service may seem antithetical to the current trend toward digital streaming services such as Rdio and Spotify, but in Chicago, boutique tape labels already sell out limited runs to people in the underground music scene. Nicholas says the most rewarding thing about the project so far has been seeing people post photos of the first cassingle in the Impossible Colors Club. In her eyes, the culture of streaming music dissolves the sense of “belonging” to a particular band, genre, or subculture. “I always think about the changing notion of showing your allegiance to the music that you like,” she says. “Collecting tapes or CDs or records is a very physical way to show that. With streaming, you never have to decide what you have an allegiance to.”
