Iskra is made up of four people, whose paths crossed many years ago because of their work connected with alternative music in the broadest sense. We organized concerts, we designed graphics for concerts, we wrote journalism, we performed onstage. Each one of us is different, and each one of us brings special knowledge and skills to the team. Out of a combination of those came Iskra Cassettes - an extraordinary label that concentrates exclusively on releasing awesome music on cassette tapes.

We’re based in one of the facilities in the old Gdańsk shipyards. The view of the docks, the cranes, the slip-ways is an inspiration to us and drives our work. The installations and buildings that surround us and the history of a place where communism began to crumble remind us of the times of analog music, issued on cassette tapes, and also of the days when independence and DIY was in the Polish DNA.Our label is independent and we have our own exclusive catalogue. That’s important to us, and that’s why we only release music we want to listen to ourselves. We don’t recognize any limits in terms of genre.

The graphics on our cassettes are important to us too. We don’t want to reproduce existing covers in a format they were never made for. We design each cover individually after talking it all through with the bands involved. We print them using riso printing techniques, which mean that the effects are unique every time; there are never two identical copies. It’s the same with the design on the cassettes themselves. We use pad printing for that. We don’t use ready-made templates. We don’t order ready-made products from outside businesses. The prints are produced in small limited series by one person. Covers are cut by hand. Every cassette is recorded on our own tower made up of a series of Tascam tape-players. Iskra is a small firm at the heart of the Gdańsk shipyards. It brings back the analog world full-circle.