Debkat al zamr (Dabke on the Flute) is one of the first titles that catches my eye as I browse the Syrian Cassette Archives website.
Released in 2007, the cassette is a compilation of high-energy regional dabke and shaabi folk-pop, recorded live at wedding celebrations across Syria, characterised by a mix of traditional woodwind instrumentation and fast, celebratory electronic keyboard arrangements.
It features performances by shaabi singers including Hameed Al Furati, Adnan Jabbouri, Hamza Khalil and Abu Al Foz, and it's the kind of recording that might once have sat forgotten on a market stall shelf or gathered dust in a family home.
Instead, it has found a second life online as part of the Syrian Cassette Archives (SCA), a project dedicated to preserving the country's rich cassette culture, which flourished from the 1970s through to the early 2000s.
The recording is just one of hundreds that have been digitised and catalogued by the archive. Archive origins Behind the initiative is founder Mark Gergis , an Iraqi-American artist, producer and archivist, and co-founder Yamen Mekdad , a Syrian music researcher, archivist and filmmaker, who have spent years rescuing a musical world that risked disappearing altogether.
The story dates back to the 1990s and early 2000s, when Mark went on regular trips to Syria to collect local music cassettes from shops and kiosks.
"I come from an experimental music background where I got interested in diaspora music while living in California. I got into this music just by attending weddings in Michigan. It was the seventies, and the dabke and shaabi [music] were orchestrated with violin, qanun and synthesisers," Mark tells The New Arab. “There was also a deep Iraqi Chobi that I got into that I couldn't find in the States. It was not being selected for cultural export. I would buy it at the Detroit diaspora shops. This led me to travel, eventually with music as a background engine to buy tapes in Syria," he adds.
Mark was collecting these cassettes out of curiosity and his love for Arabic, especially Syrian, music. But as he watched events unfold in Syria after 2011, he felt a sense of responsibility towards his collection and the Syrian cassette archive more generally.
"A lot of musician friends of mine had been displaced or were seeking refugee status in other countries. People stopped recording, and the studios and cassette shops were destroyed. I started thinking about these cassettes. Most of this music had ever only existed on cassette, and it was at risk of disappearing entirely," Mark explains. In addition to safeguarding these tapes, there was an urgent need to "try and document those networks, thinking about the stories behind these cassettes."
Having moved to London from California in 2018, Mark first set about relocating his entire cassette collection, then comprising around 700 cassettes, from the US to London.
It was here that he received an interview request from Yamen, who wanted to discuss Mark's 2004 audio document, I Remember Syria . The two met, and before long, they were thinking of ways to turn the archive into a real project. Digital revival As he probed deeper into Mark's collection, Yamen realised that he was connecting with Syria "on a sonic and geographical level."
"Because when you find the cassette, you zoom in to the village where it came from, and then you start thinking about the diversity it holds," Yamen tells The New Arab. The collection offered a refreshing insight into a side of Syria different from the one appearing in his news feed, especially at a time when the Syrian revolution was losing much of its momentum.
Once the cassettes were digitised, Mark and Yamen brainstormed ways they could showcase this growing archive and "present the cassettes in an engaging way where people can learn about the ecosystem of the cassette era," Mark explains.
They launched the SCA website in late 2021, with the digitised collection comprising music from Syria's different communities, including Syrian Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, and Armenians, as well as music from Iraq. The tapes also span a wide range of musical genres — some are recordings of live concerts; others are studio albums. There are also children's music albums, and users can navigate the archive in English or Arabic and can select their preferred genre and/or decade. Building the archive With the support of a growing network of collaborators, the collective soon began conducting interviews with artists, producers, musicians, and designers involved in Syria's cassette era. Together, SCA's digitised tapes and written content reveal an ambition that goes beyond preservation alone. They suggest an interest in celebrating the overlooked and largely unrecognised musicians of Syria's rich cassette era — the shaabi singers who performed at weddings and other festivities and were outside the mainstream.
"They were immediate tapes and were made with the purpose of putting the artist's name out there. There was a calling card because these were wedding singers. They needed their name and their face on those cassette racks every year, maybe [releasing] ten tapes or more a year," Mark shares with The New Arab about the shaabi singer albums.
"Those weren't seen as important to document. But I think there's value in those tapes. And I think those were the tapes that we had in mind; those are the ones that were endangered," he adds.
For Yamen, the fact that the shaabi singers remained on the periphery resulted from the lack of an institutionalised music industry in Syria.
"There was no industry for musicians to become popular, as in Lebanon or in Egypt," Yamen tells The New Arab , adding that this absence was a legacy of Hafez al-Assad's Baathist regime.
So while singers like George Wassuf, Mayada Hinawi, Asala Nasri, and Sabah Fakhri achieved regional recognition, many other singers remained unknown.
"From Qamishli to the Assyrian villages along the Khabur River to Hauran to the urban cities, these musicians didn't have the opportunity to reach a popular level [or be supported by] an industry that would promote their work and get them to places," Yamen asserts. Hidden voices Over the years, SCA has built an avid community of followers, with supporters continuing to bring their personal collections to the archive.
In addition, the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024 has allowed the team to return to Syria in search of more tapes.
Beyond collecting tapes, the collective delivered a training workshop in music archiving and digitisation, as well as roundtable discussions and listening sessions.
In fact, a significant part of the collective's activity revolves around organising events and engaging with the public.
"We hold lecture performances where we sit in an open forum, listen together to excerpts from the archive, and talk about these artists. We also do DJ-style sets. I think those are a great way to bring the archive to life for people and to keep it interactive," Mark explains.
For Mark and Yamen, SCA is an unending vocation — their vision for the archive includes expanding their existing collection and continuing to explore new ways to interact with it.
"The archives are here today and gone tomorrow. So it's important to document these [cassettes] and to learn about them, not in the Western sense of archiving and preservation, not necessarily in that way," says Mark.
"There's a human approach to it, and it’s the humanity of the cassette era that really stands out for us. That's what keeps it so compelling."
As for Yamen, being able to operate in Syria now "holds a new kind of weight and importance."
He explains, "I'm also thinking about ways we can be more present and host these collections and the digitisation component more rigorously."
More than a digital archive, SCA becomes a way of listening back to a country through its everyday soundscape — where music once travelled through wedding halls, roadside stalls and family homes.
In giving these tapes a second life, the collective restores not only forgotten recordings, but fragments of cultural memory that might otherwise have faded entirely.
Syrian Cassette Archives will be presenting an event at Ibraaz in London on Saturday 27 June, featuring a screening of Salamiyah, Lady of the Land (2026), a documentary reportage co-directed by Omar Malas and Yamen Mekdad that explores the sonic heritage of the city of Salamiyah. The screening will be followed by a live performance of selections drawn from the SCA archive. Nourhan Tewfik is a London-based arts journalist specialising in the Middle East. She is also an Arabic TV/film consultant and researcher. Her writing has appeared in Arab News, The National, Ahram Online, Al Ahram Weekly and T MENA: The New York Times Style Magazine Follow her on Instagram: @ nourhantewfik