In many houses across the UK, stowaway cassette tapes tell the intimate stories of diasporic communities. Through Tape Letters, Wajid Yaseen decided to play them again.
Before WhatsApp, voice notes, and reliable international calls, diasporic communities spoke to each other via cassette.
When sonic artist Wajid Yaseen found a box of them in his mother’s bedroom, he didn’t realise the history he was about to uncover. He spent the next eight years making sure the voices he discovered were heard.
Wajid Yaseen’s father had passed away 15 years ago when he returned to his mother’s home in Manchester. He was in a stage of grief where he felt a real need to connect with his father, which is when he remembered his tapes.
His dad was highly regarded for his renditions of Naat, traditional devotional hymns, recording them on cassettes to share with the community. Yaseen knew his mum kept a box of them in her home: “I wanted to hear his voice and him singing, not talking to me, but him singing.”
What Yaseen didn’t realise was that he had found the beginnings of an historical archive, not just of his family’s history, but that of the British-Pakistani community.
Yaseen, a 57-year-old sonic artist, is dynamic and engaging. He was born in Manchester in the late ’60s and was the first of his family to be born in the UK.
His father migrated over in the early ’60s, expecting to stay for a few years and return home. However, instead, his mother moved to join him, and they made a life together in England.
Yaseen moved to London when he was 18 and now describes himself as a “proper Londoner,” having lived there for nearly 40 years. Sound and music have always been pillars in his life, from hearing his dad sing to working in the music industry.
While pursuing a PhD in Sonic Arts, Yaseen started Modus Arts, an organisation that uses an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to public sound-based artworks and events. They are now a National Portfolio Organisation, proudly core-funded by the Arts Council of England.
Looking for his father’s tapes, Yaseen not only found the Naat recordings, but also additional tapes that were labelled in Urdu: the name of his mother’s village in Pakistan, and Zarina Dar, his aunt who now lives in Canada.
As he played them, he unlocked a series of nostalgic memories. He remembered being asked to say hello to his aunties and uncles as his parents recorded tapes to send to family in Pakistan and around the world. “I was like, oh my God, there’s something in this, right? What can I do with this thing?”
This is where the Tape Letters began.
Primarily, the aim of the project was to create a central archive. Yaseen realised that if these tapes were in his mum’s bedroom, it meant there was a sender and receiver, and there were more people involved in this form of communication.
“As artists, you know, we’re really good at weaving something out of nothing. We’re good at translating and transposing an idea,” Yaseen explains.
And that’s exactly what he did with these initial tapes. He approached the Arts Council three times, pitching the idea of exhibiting these tapes and got denied every time.
“It’s only then when I really realised it was a heritage project — a potential capture of British history through sound — that’s when it was like, oh fuck, there we go. We’ve got something here now.” He then spoke to the Heritage Fund, which was thrilled with the idea, and after a few tweaks, it was approved.
Throughout Tape Letters, Yaseen and his team have collected more than 80 tapes and 200 interviews from people of Pakistani heritage living in the United Kingdom.
They found that these tapes not only recorded the everyday musings and updates of families across borders, but also extraordinary insights into gender discrimination, migration, class, politics and more.
They found that cassette tapes were used for communication between the 1960s and 1990s for reasons such as poor communication networks in Pakistan, the enormous expense of international calls, and literacy issues.
“We were very specifically interested in cassettes because of the sort of democratisation and access — cassettes are relatively cheap, and it meant that they didn’t have to go into studios to record these messages,” Yaseen explains.
“They could just do them in their living rooms, whatever, right?” Most of these tapes were delivered by hand. Some were even sewn into cloth bags to keep them private throughout their long journeys.
Although Yaseen’s discovery of the tape letters began with a longing to connect with his late father, Yaseen’s mother, who passed away in November 2025, was the heart of the project.
“If not for her stories, her willingness to share extraordinary private information, we would have no idea about this thing. And it’s actually a very interesting way for me to honour her in a way that I couldn’t do with my dad.”
Her use of the tapes was powerful. Through the tapes, she found her voice. When her husband, Yaseen’s father, travelled to the UK, she was left with her in-laws in Pakistan, who mistreated her horribly.
With the distance between them and the traditional gender norms of the time and culture, there was nothing her husband could do from abroad to protect her.
When she reached England, the abuse continued through letters. One day, she exclaimed that she’d had enough. She checked in with her husband and decided to record a tape to send back with a relative who was going to Pakistan. The tape essentially told them off for their mistreatment and said she wouldn’t stand for it any longer.
The relative travelling with the tape found out what was on it and, instead of delivering it, returned it to her: “She was fucking furious, like properly furious, and sent it in the post.”
When the family received it, “shit hit the fan.” But what it revealed was that these tapes were more than mundane life updates: “they were essentially a pathway for people to actually have their voices heard.”
With this story as the cornerstone of the project, Yaseen went in search of other untold narratives.
Yaseen found Asim, now based in Bradford, with his wife Asma. “They were in an arranged marriage, but not a forced one,” he explains. They had met a few times before, but every time they spoke on the phone, there was a lingering awkwardness.
There weren’t mobile phones then, so phone calls were hard to keep private, with most phones being connected to the landline in common rooms.
“So Asim came up with the idea of recording a message on tape and then sending it alongside a blank tape and a blank player. He spilt his heart on this thing [about] how much he really cared for her.”
He would wait, without any idea how long or if he would hear back, but eventually he did. The feelings were reciprocal. They ended up sending tapes back and forth to each other every two to three weeks for three years.
In Asma’s interview with Tape Letters, she explains: “I used to wait for his cassette, and I used to wait for the postman wondering when he would turn up and when he would give me the cassette. I just listened to it straight away. I can’t describe those feelings. It’s like I am listening to what is in his heart for the first time, and what he thinks about me. It was just an amazing feeling.”
With a warm smile, Yaseen explains that they “fell in love on the tapes, like properly.” The couple donated three tapes each to the archive, but they have over 50 still in their personal collection.
Although Yaseen focused specifically on the British-Pakistani community, he found that this form of communication was used across many different diasporas. “The key thing is that we know that they were essentially the emotional life language for all of them, right?”
The Lebanese Civil War offers a parallel use of this form of communication during the same time period. Ali left his village of Baalbek to pursue a degree in Boston during the height of the conflict. With phone lines down and international calls unaffordable, he started sending cassettes home with friends and family travelling back to Lebanon.
Ali fixed a broken tape recorder given to him by his roommate to record stories about his new life in America. “We talked about the subway like it was something new. Of course. We never left Baalbek before, and now we come to a country where they have a train to move around.”
He compared it to the use of voice notes now. “Imagine you went to Thailand and you had to tell your mum about the place, and you had to do it via WhatsApp voice note. You’d tell us about all the new things that you see in that country that you didn’t have, and all the things that you like and you don’t like.”
The immense trust given to Yaseen and his team from the participants of this project isn’t lost on him: “What we realised is that as people undertaking these practices and uncovering these memories, even if it’s nothing to do with anything traumatic. It’s always going to be messy.”
He explains that his empathetic nature made it natural for him to read people’s emotional states easily. He had a significant team of people working alongside them that were trained in oral history as a discipline and the notions of empathy needed in conducting this sort of practice.
With a background in sonic arts, Yaseen had confidence he could transform his findings into physical and experiential exhibitions. It was key to ensure that people like Yaseen’s mum, at the heart of the project, would be able to engage with these stories, not just academics who access a library archive.
Their approach was to use a multilingual framing of the outputs. The major hurdle was that most tapes were recorded in Pothwari, not Urdu, an oral language. Although Urdu is one of the national languages of Pakistan alongside English, only about 7% of the population speaks it at home.
There are gender and class implications associated with Pothwari: “The reason why these guys couldn’t read or write Urdu is because they didn’t go to school — and I’m talking about like primary level. They didn’t go to school because they were girls. They weren’t allowed to. So the tapes were this way of getting past that.”
The team transliterated the interviews and tapes from Pothwari to Urdu, and from there they could translate into English. It was an extremely intensive and costly process, but one that was essential to the sharing of the project.
Tape Letters has created archives at the Bishopsgate Institute and the National Library of Scotland, they have curated history modules for schools, put on successful exhibitions, created award-winning podcasts, and have reached more than 10 million people with these stories.
Although Yaseen isn’t accepting more tapes at this time, he continues to give talks about this project and helps other communities to create their own archives. Modus Arts continues to work on other sound-based projects that bring people together.
Over 60 years since the earliest tape letters were recorded, the yearning for intentional, sound-based communication hasn’t gone away. Cassettes gave way to CDs and CDs to smartphones, but the desire survived the original format.
Voice notes, the modern-day tape letter, have become a lifeline, particularly for South West Asian and North Africa (SWANA) and Asian communities. Speaking in their native language is often easier than typing in a non-Latin alphabet.
The sound of someone’s voice carries more emotion, especially internationally. The conscious choice to record oneself, whether it’s the ongoings of daily life, proclaiming your love, or calling out your toxic in-laws, has always been an act of using sound to carry emotional meaning. The medium might have changed, but the power it holds hasn’t.
When asked what Yaseen has taken away from this project, he has a hard time condensing the eight years of lessons. He concludes that the one thing he would pass on is to interview your own parents, if you can.
“You think you know them. You’ve come from their bodies, right? But you really don’t. The act of interviewing somebody is another part of their memory that isn’t accessed normally. Nobody normally talks about this stuff unless you’re prompted. And to do that, you need a structured way of doing it.”
He believes this is the key to unlocking extraordinary stories.
All images by Maryam Wahid.