ABSTRACT:

This paper considers three London-based audiocassette tape collections – the Tape Letters Project, the Palestinian Sound Archive, and the Syrian Cassette Archive - as “anarchival” sources for migratory communities relocated to the United Kingdom from South Asia and the Middle East. Each of these emergent archives turns up new uses for obsolete media forms, both in recollecting history and in generating new forms of sonic art and communication. Rather than focusing on the changes that recording technology wrought on local traditions and stylistic forms, I am specifically concerned with the material interventions that generations of listeners bring to the juxtaposed framework of diasporic memory embodied in cassette archives. How does the digital migration and online recollection of analog sound media both provoke and radically alter the construction of musical histories? The media archaeological concept of “anarchive” proposes an anti-canonical use of material memory as “a selective reactivation of past patterns of action” (The Future of Indeterminacy Project 2025, also Zielinski 2015, Zaayman 2023). The cultural politics of these archival projects are complicated. They refuse inscription into a state-driven politics of recognition and digital access, but also recognize the often-scrambled nature of diasporic recollection. But if these cassette anarchives refuse centralization while demanding particular and personal levels of knowledge, this is not a bug but a feature. Who better to unpack the burden of memory housed in cassettes than those who have taken the time to collect them? 

ABOUT DAVID NOVAK:

David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music. He is the author of the award-winning book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke 2013) and co-editor of Keywords in Sound (Duke 2015). His current book project, Diggers: A Global Counterhistory of Popular Music, theorizes musical globalization through contemporary histories of digital and analog sound media, particularly among networks of record and cassette collectors, informal sound archives, reissue labels and sound recording digitization projects in Southeast Asia.