Tape Letters: A Magnetic History

This talk considers a recent UK-based audiocassette collection - the Tape Letters Project founded by sound artist Wajid Yaseen - as an "anarchival" source of diasporic history, drawn from the closets and attics of Pakistani communities relocated to the United Kingdom after Partition. Rather than focusing on the changes that recording technology has wrought on local traditions or the continuity of style, I am specifically concerned with the material networks of intercommunication used by generations of cassettes to recollect and reproduce diasporic memory. How do physical sound media both provoke and radically alter the contemporary construction of migratory histories? "Anarchives" propose anti-canonical uses of sound recordings that reflect on the loss and displacement of collective history. Tape Letters are complicated. Their obsolete and overflowing forms refuse to be inscribed into a state-driven politics of recognition and digital accessibility, but their physical persistence houses the complex memorialization of traumatic experience in its all of its compressions, erasures, gaps, drop-outs, wows and flutters. If anarchival listening demands particular and personal levels of knowledge, this is not a bug but a feature. Who better to unpack the burden of memory dubbed onto cassettes than those who have taken the time to collect them?

David Novak is Associate Professor in Music and Director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at University of California Santa Barbara. He is the author of Tapeheads: A Living History of the Cassette in Indonesia (Elevation 2025) and co-editor (with Matt Sakakeeny) of Keywords in Sound (Duke 2015) and his award-winning book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke 2013) has been published in five languages. His current project, entitled Diggers: An Archival Counterhistory of Popular Music, explores the globalization of music through networks of record and cassette collectors, informal sound archives, reissue labels and media digitization projects in the Global South.