Kashmir’s Sufi music lovers are sticking with the audio cassette

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SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Farooq Ahmad Shaksaaz presses a button on his 1970 Sharp cassette participant, and with a hefty clack the machine whirrs to life. Because the Kashmiri tailor stitches, the machine crackles for a second earlier than Ghulam Ahmad Sofi’s otherworldly voice fills his store with verses about divine love and the ache of separation from the beloved creator of the universe.

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Shaksaaz, a tailor within the Kashmiri metropolis of Srinagar, inherited his ardour for native Sufi music from his grandfather together with a meticulously preserved assortment of audio cassette tapes from the Seventies, which he usually listens to as he works.

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He’s a part of a small, devoted group that believes cassette tapes are one of the best ways to take heed to and archive the Sufi music of Indian-controlled Kashmir, the place music impressed by native and central Asian Muslim saints has lengthy been a deep expression of spirituality and emotion. Many individuals flip to the music for non secular steerage, or searching for an escape from the area’s lengthy intervals of road battles, shutdowns and safety clampdowns.

For many years, cassette gamers have carried the soul-stirring poetry of Sufi saints and the paranormal melodies of Kashmiri devices just like the sarangi and santoor, and it’s lengthy been an area ritual for households to collect across the heat hum of a tape participant. Even at present, the area’s conventional Sufi music gatherings are sometimes recorded solely on the disappearing audio format, which was broadly used from the Seventies to the Nineteen Nineties.

Whereas the music is more and more obtainable on digital codecs, many Kashmiris say that it’s greatest heard on cassette tapes.

“There’s something distinctive about this machine that for me performs recordings of non secular guides,” mentioned Abdul Ahad, a carpet weaver. “It’s a sacred ritual in itself to press the play button of a cassette participant to take heed to a music on non secular moorings.”

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Lots of the most beloved albums have been launched by native report labels throughout the heyday of the audio cassette, however devoted devotees of the style are nonetheless bringing tape recorders to gatherings. Digital recorders are sometimes unwelcome at these nightly music classes, as Sufi music lovers say they blur collectively the distinct sounds of the completely different devices.

“It’s a completely different expertise to take heed to music on a tape recorder,” mentioned Abdul Hamid Khan. “Tapes are easy and you may really feel the sound of each instrument, you don’t get that really feel in these new gamers.”

Nonetheless, as tapes put on out and extra music strikes to digital streaming platforms and smartphones, the tactile and deeply private listening expertise of cassettes is turning into tougher to maintain going.

Many households have been pressured to half with their gamers resulting from mechanical failures, whereas others battle to protect their cherished cassette collections, a few of which maintain uncommon and irreplaceable recordings handed down via generations. Some collectors have turned to digitizing their outdated recordings to safeguard them for future generations.

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Only some outlets in Srinagar, the area’s fundamental metropolis, promote tape recorders or clean tapes, and the provision of spare components and expert restore technicians has drastically dwindled.

A handful of mechanics within the Kashmir Valley nonetheless cater to a devoted inhabitants of Sufi music lovers, painstakingly restoring machines made by beloved Japanese manufacturers like Sharp and Kenwood within the final century.

Mohammad Ashraf Matoo, a self-taught mechanic, has spent years preserving decades-old cassette gamers operating at the same time as spare components develop into more and more scarce. He purchases non-functional recorders to extract usable parts, and manufactures some components himself to maintain his clients’ gadgets going. As soon as repaired, a well-functioning tape recorder is bought for a worth between $150 and $850, relying on its model and situation.

Shaksaaz, a lifelong Sufi music devotee, referred to as it a “private mission” to protect the legacy of cassette tapes.

“It’s a bridge to the previous, a option to stay related to our non secular and cultural roots on this ever modernizing and digital world,” he mentioned.

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