Syrian Cassette Archive

Syrian Cassette Archives is an initiative to preserve, research, and share sounds and stories from Syria's cassette era (1970s-2010). This period gave voice to regional folk and shaabi artists, wedding per‐ formers, and singers from communities who had never previously had the means to record or distribute their work. The collection re‐ flects the diversity of Syria's musical landscape, including recordings from Syrian Arab, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Armenian communities, alongside Iraqi, Lebanese, and other regional recordings sold on cas‐ sette in Syria at the time. The cassette was the de facto medium for music across the country during this time, producing a vast, largely undocumented body of recordings that rarely travelled beyond local reach.

Founded in 2018 and led by Mark Gergis and Yamen Mekdad from London and Damascus, the archive has digitised more than 1,000 cas‐ settes from fragile collections, conducts oral history interviews with musicians and producers from the era, and publishes original re‐ search, writing, and documentary films with a growing team of col‐ laborators, alongside public events and listening sessions. The collec‐ tion is freely accessible online in Arabic and English.

The fragility of the cassette medium, the largely unrecorded know‐ ledge of those who made and distributed this music, Syria's war and the displacement that followed all put this heritage at serious risk. SCA works against that loss as a living archive committed to keeping these sounds and the stories behind them available to anyone.