How cassette tapes preserved Syria's unofficial soundtrack

For nearly three decades, these recordings carried voices ignored by official media across the country's streets, taxis and nightclubs. Now, they are being digitised into a comprehensive archive.

Syrian Cassette Archive

Iraqi-American musician and researcher Mark Gergis, who co-founded Syrian Cassette Archives, began collecting cassette tapes during visits to Syria in the 1990s.

How cassette tapes preserved Syria's unofficial soundtrack

Khalil Sweileh

last update on 25 Mar 2026

In 1979, during a meeting between a delegation from the Arab Writers Union and members of the National Progressive Front, the late Syrian poet Mamdouh Adwan delivered a testimony lasting nine minutes and 35 seconds. In a turbulent gathering in Damascus, Adwan accused the Syrian media of falsehood and hurled a torrent of accusations at the authorities. Those accusations included charges of corruption, monopolising political life, silencing dissent, and sowing sectarian division.

Remarkably, the speech was recorded on cassette, smuggled out of the meeting hall, and endured as an act of cultural courage, passed furtively from hand to hand before eventually finding its way to YouTube years later. In doing so, it opened the way for other tapes featuring the poems of Muzaffar al-Nawwab, the songs of Sheikh Imam, the recordings of the Kurdish singer Şivan, and the works of Ziad Rahbani—all far removed from the standards, controls, and conditions imposed by the establishment.

Elsewhere, rudimentary recordings captured local wedding celebrations and sessions of ‘ataba, sweihli, moulia, and firaqiyyat—vernacular song forms steeped in lament, longing, and rural improvisation. This popular cassette culture served as a compass, guiding marginalised voices towards fame and circulation. Then came the electronic keyboard, with its inexhaustible musical permutations, displacing the rababa and the mijwiz—long-standing emblems of the region’s folk soundscape—and unsettling the original grain of melody and voice.

For nearly three decades, cassettes dominated the local and regional soundscape. Their sounds spilt out from pavement vendors, taxi drivers, garages, and cassette kiosks, religious supplications and devotional chants mingling with the wounded strains of an obscure singer’s ataba, or with the sounds of a wedding held on the rooftop of a house in an informal settlement. In the latter, a singer would pause during a set, turning to greet the bridegroom and certain guests. In doing so, they provided intimate expressions of marginal voices, long neglected by authorities and cultural elites in favour of what was deemed more elevated song.

From the late 1990s onwards, these precious fragments of intangible heritage captured the imagination of a new generation of cassette enthusiasts. A handful—most notably Mark Gergis, a young American of Iraqi origin, and the Syrian musician Yamen Mekdad—began collecting as many tapes as they could. They later set out to digitise what would become the Syrian Cassette Archives, helping to shield this neglected inheritance from oblivion and opening a sonic portal into the past.

PHOTO BY MARK GERGIS via Syrian Cassette Archive — Cassette shop - Hama, Syria, 2006

A sonic portal into the past

Gergis first encountered the vibrant Syrian cassette scene during a visit to Damascus in the late 1990s. Captivated by the popular songs he heard pumping from the places he visited, he began buying tapes by the dozen. Later, he met Mekdad, and together they set about documenting and digitising these recordings.

The distinctiveness of the cassette tape lay not only in its content, but also in the visual language of its cover, the name of the local recording company, the singer’s hairstyle, and even the florid preamble of the master of ceremonies. A performer and their band were often introduced with incendiary titles such as ‘the singer of the soldiers’ and the ‘singer of the dabke and the dal’ouna’.

Amid these trappings stood names that remained officially obscure, among them Kawthar Mansour, Sanaa al-Hussein, Suleiman al-Shaar, Mohammad Sadeq Hadid, Friha al-Abdullah, Hussein al-Hassan, Adel Khodour, and even Fouad Faqrou. The last of these, who would later become known as Fouad Ghazi, deserves particular attention, his ascent and decline closely mirroring the age he expressed with such singular force.

A rural Syrian singer, Ghazi, emerged from Syrian wedding celebrations, his sound drawing together mountain song, ‘ataba, and mawwal, as though someone had blended shanklish with mansaf. His musical output was preserved in rough recordings that found their natural habitat in cassette kiosks on the fringes of rural bus depots.

The Syrian Cassette Archives is helping to shield the neglected inheritance from oblivion and opening a sonic portal into the past

From there, the songs slipped into the minibuses until the young singer finally reached the nightclubs of the capital as a commanding and magnetic voice, one perfectly attuned to the temperament of those who frequented such venues at the time.

The nightclubbers were a class of nouveaux riche and military figures who had imposed themselves as a ruling stratum from the mid-1970s onwards. Ghazi's singing style gave fitting expression to their musical disposition: a borrowed modernity in their way of life, coupled with a rural temper that gratified the pull of nostalgia towards the earliest social formations from which they had sprung.

Ghazi, leaving weddings and suburban nightspots behind, became the star attraction at the Malha al-Qasr, the most luxurious club in Damascus. He mingled with the social elite, getting to know those who could secure him access to Radio Damascus's studios through discreet recommendations.

His song Saff al-Fashak served as his passport to the airwaves. That song, born amid the clamour of wedding recordings, was itself subjected to rigorous technical treatment. It was Lazra'ik Boustan Wroud, however, that would make his name. With lyrics by Hassan Youssef, an officer in the Defence Companies, and music by Abdel Fattah Sukkar, a composer who helped bring forth some of Syria's most celebrated voices, the song carried him into wide renown.

Some of his cassettes, including Ta'b Al Mashwar, are featured in the Syrian Cassette Archives, which runs to around 1,500 tapes. Together, they offer a preliminary map of local musical forms, alongside rare recordings that document exceptional moments. Taken as a whole, they form part of a collective effort to gather the country's torn contours into a musical and research-based whole.

Mapping Syria through tape

The importance of this material extends beyond the songs themselves. It also lies in the attention given to the research value of everyday life, popular sensibility, and the mosaic of Syrian voices neglected by the official archive.

Researcher Christina Hazboun points to the particularity of Syriac and Assyrian song in north-eastern Syria, especially in Qamishli, and to how cassette tapes helped to preserve it through local voices before it moved beyond church walls and liturgical settings into the street and wedding celebrations. Syriac, Armenian, and Kurdish musicians all worked to weave this mixed heritage into songs that, in more than one language, spoke of shared sorrows of love, loss, and estrangement.

According to Hazboun, the cassette was more than a mere audio medium. It was a means of preserving language, a tool for consolidating cultural identity in the face of displacement and oblivion, and a vessel for all that pertains to feeling, longing, and collective memory, far from the monopoly of both authority and church.

The cassette played a vital role in preserving the oral heritage of the Jazira, the Euphrates region, and the steppe, safeguarding rare recordings of 'ataba, sweihli, nayel, firaqiyyat, and rural song. It did so across a landscape open to the desert in both directions, where the sha'ar—the singer-poet—carried reproach, separation, and satire from one place to another to the strains of the rababa.

These forms met and parted again in dialogue with Iraqi heritage, following the bends of the Euphrates and the sweep of the steppe. In this way, the music found a passage beyond narrow regionalism towards broader horizons, as though the scale of popular music could never be complete without the ache of 'ataba, the melodies of the Euphrates, and the music of the Bedouin world.

Perhaps it was this very aural disposition that gave the tapes of Samira Tawfiq's songs such an exalted place among the people of the region, as though she herself had been born among Bedouin encampments—especially after she sang Mandal Ya Karim al-Gharbi and Ya 'Ein Moulayiten. No cassette shop, moreover, was without the songs of Iraqi singers such as Yas Khidr, Hussein Nehme, and Fouad Salem, owing to the affinity of dialect, sorrow, and folklore.

As one moves south towards Hauran, the tones of the rababa recede before the mijwiz, while the rhythm of the dabke shifts with the contours of the land. Locally recorded tapes of Ahmad al-Qassim brought Haurani song to the fore and carried it beyond its narrow geographical confines. His boldest venture, however, was to enter the terrain of Fairuz's Ma Shawart Hali, drawing it away from the piano-led original into an exuberant Haurani rhythm. It was an act of musical experimentation pushed to its furthest edge—so much so that the song's composer, Ziad Rahbani, praised the attempt for unsettling the original text and placing it within an altogether different musical mode.

And yet one must pause to ask: where are the cultural studies to accompany the age of the cassette and examine its contents sociologically? Archiving alone cannot suffice as a way of reading this material, however rich it may be as raw cultural substance.

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