Theories of location recording have often figured the portable recorder as a prosthetic ear, reaching locations and staying attuned far exceeding the capacity of the normative human ear. While surveillance tapes loom large as an iconic example of this imaginary, many tape-based practices—and their successors—are framed around the desire to hear better and beyond. Even the vernacular practice of dubbing an ill-timed radio program for post-broadcast consumption fits this bill.

In this paper, I attend to a homemade cassette archive whose very production techniques and auditory narratives offer a critique of the ableism at the heart of this hegemonic formulation of field recording: an 18-cassette collection of recordings made by a Polish American woman, Gail Mary Killian (1953–88), who lived with Down Syndrome. Every year on her birthday, Killian would place a tape recorder in her family’s kitchen as community arrived to celebrate, sing, and organize mutual aid. Since the mic’s position was stable and the late afternoons are unedited, the tapes capture singing, overlapping dialogues, radio dubs, and kitchen activity. Multilingual conversations focus on the material concerns (employment) and delights (food) of the long-standing white Catholic working-class in Taunton, MA. After Killian’s passing her collection was passed to a nephew, the family’s informal archivist, who collaborated with Columbia’s Oral History Archives to ensure their preservation. My paper explores how we might hear the tape archive as Killian’s own theory of field recording, one that decenters itemizable sonic content to resonate practices and cacophonies of being together.

This paper considers three London-based audiocassette tape collections – the Palestinian Sound Archive, the Tape Letters Project, and the Syrian Cassette Archive - as “anarchival” sources of diasporic memory for migratory communities relocated to the United Kingdom from South Asia and the Middle East. Each of these emergent archives turns up new possibilities for understanding the impacts of residual media, both in recollecting migratory history and in generating new forms of sonic art and communication. Rather than focusing on the changes that cassette technology wrought on local traditions and stylistic forms, I am specifically concerned with the material interventions that generations of listeners bring to a juxtaposed framework of diasporic memory. How does the digital migration of analog sound collections into online archives both provoke and radically alter the construction of musical and cultural histories?

The media archaeological concept of an “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). These projects recognize the scrambled nature of diasporic recollection and the multiplicity of cultural memories at play in a mediated community, while refusing inscription into a state-driven politics of recognition and digital access. If cassette archives demand particular and personal levels of knowledge, this is not a bug but a feature of their technological affordances. Who better to unpack the burden of memory housed in cassettes than those who have taken the time to circulate and collect them?

This paper examines the material surfaces of Kurdish music cassettes in Turkey, focusing on their covers—or more precisely, the absence of images and text—as a political and cultural space. From the 1970s to the 2000s, Turkish Kurdish musicians produced most of their recordings in exile, unable to return due to state-imposed censorship. Their music, carrying revolutionary messages, reached colonized Kurdistan—Turkey’s Southeast—through audiotapes. Kurdish songs, particularly those smuggled from the diaspora, were distributed clandestinely. In some cases, the cassette surfaces bore subtle inscriptions—small scratches, encrypted words or letters; in others, they were left entirely unmarked. The most secure method of hiding these recordings, however, was placing Kurdish music inside Turkish cassette covers, often repurposing tapes of original Arabesk or Turkish popular music.

During this period of prohibition, most Kurdish listeners in Turkey received the voices of diaspora musicians without visual references. They imagined the faces of artists purely through sound, and learned their names much later, if ever. This paper traces how sound and visual representation are strategically separated in the colonial repression of musical media. It investigates the political negotiation of cassette surfaces and magnetic strips in the Kurdish experience and how the resonance of sound transforms in relation to the visual. Addressing a community whose past - along with their musical and visual archives – have been erased in the production of history, the surfaces of the Kurdish cassette network reveal how the absence of images can manifest new imaginaries of political listening.

This paper examines how politicians, musicians, and ethnomusicologists have used Punjabi cassettes in both nostalgic narratives of bygone sociocultural unity and critiques of contemporary social breakdown. Although now digital, contemporary Punjabi media industries wax nostalgic for audio and video cassettes. Music videos use cassette imagery, and full-length musical films celebrate 1980s village VCR ownership and rental. Nostalgia for cassettes includes nostalgia for their surrounding social formations: purportedly more-cohesive Punjabi village society, and purportedly more-“folkloric” and authentically Punjabi musical culture, including cassette-circulated trucksongs. This cassette nostalgia adjoins critiques from politicians, scholars, and musicians decrying present-day rural drug addiction and undocumented American outmigration. However, in prior decades other musicians, politicians, and ethnomusicologists critiqued truckborne cassette circulations for spreading obscenity and eroding social cohesion, accusations which provoked assassinations of musicians. These critics heard modernizing anomie in the same recording and distribution formats within which many Punjabi listeners now nostalgically hear cohesion.

Despite their opposing stances towards Punjabi trucksong cassette circulations, listeners past and present have used tape and its obscene musics to express social theories opposing newly-gendered social decay to past village unity, thereby splicing anomie and nostalgia together. I argue that these jointly nostalgic and anomic narratives, both in classic ethnomusicological critiques of cultural commodification and in contemporary critiques of Punjabi rurality, begin with 19th-century colonial ethnographic theorizing about village unification. Building on anthropological analyses of “media ideologies” (Hull 2011), I trace how these oppositional tales of musical-social decay overdubbed structurally similar moral narratives upon the same Punjabi tape.