EVERY time a cassette arrived at Aqsa Mohammed’s Glasgow home from family back in Pakistan, there would be tears.

“My mum would listen to the tapes and tears would fall – she was always crying,” says Aqsa.

“Even when recording she would be crying. I’d get excited though. It felt like a different feeling for us – a very emotional time. Emotional for her. Excitement for us.”

Tape Letters Scotland, a new audio-visual exhibition which is coming to Glasgow this month, shines a light on the use of audio cassettes as a mode of long-distance communication by the Pakistani diaspora in Scotland between the 1960s and 1980s.

(Image: Miriam Ali)

Drawing directly from first-hand interviews carried out by the project team and the informal, intimate conversations recorded on cassettes themselves, the exhibitions showcase the experiences of Scotland’s Pakistani communities, exploring the topics of migration, identity, communication and language.

A pre-cursor to the modern-day voice-note, sending physical audio cassette recordings became popular amongst British-Pakistani communities in the 1960s, as a means of communicating with friends and relatives.

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It was cheaper than international telephone calls, and more accessible for those unable to read or write letters.

However, the practice has since remained largely unknown to many, even within British-Pakistani communities, with many original tapes lost or later recorded over.

(Image: Miriam Ali)

First launched in 2018, Tape Letters is a pioneering project by Modus Arts, which aims to unearth, archive and represent a portrait of this method of communication for communities during this period.

At a time when the telephone was communal, the tapes left room for intimacy in messages to loved ones.

Tabassum Niamat, Munwar Sultan and Fariha Khan, from Glasgow, all took part in the project.

Fariha, who contributed to the archive, said: “Dad used to turn the cassette player on and test it and, you know, he’d bang on the mic saying ‘testing, testing’.

“It was just such an exciting thing preparing to record something. Like, what are we doing here? He’d then explain to us that it was a message for the family back home in Pakistan.”

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Abdul Latif Aziz, also from Glasgow, recalls: “My first recollection of tape messages was actually in Pakistan, in my Taya's (uncle's) house in the village, seven or eight people around a manja (string bed) sitting in the main room where all the manjas were laid at nighttime.

“There’d be maybe seven or eight beds in this little place. I remember my Taya pulling out a cassette recorder and a single cassette, and everybody sitting around it and someone pressing the record and the play button together, and then giving their salaam (hello), and recording whatever they had to say.

“The other thing I remember is a child playing with something and banging it and my Taya saying, don’t do that, it’ll record all the knocks, and he’s saying that in the recording louder than the noise he’s telling the kid off for…”

The cumulation of two years of work,  the exhibitions showcase the stories and experiences from 20 cassette tapes and 80 oral histories, gathered from individuals and families living across Scotland’s central belt.

Wajid Yaseen, Director of Modus Arts, said: “The Tape Letters project has turned out to be far more fruitful than I could have envisaged, and analysing the archive has felt akin to undertaking a sort of 'sonic archaeology' – a deep dive into a wide range of fields and themes.

“It primarily demonstrates the deep and inherent need for people to communicate with each other in whatever way they can, wherever they're originally from or wherever they find themselves in the world.”

Tape Letters Scotland is at Glasgow’s Tramway from October 12 until January.