TAPES,
AS MEMORY
A living radio archive. Turning old cassette tapes into living memory you can access and listen to anywhere.
Tune into family archives.
TAPES, AS MEMORY was born to tackle our collective loss of physical music.
In the 80s, my parents flew from Akwa Ibom state in Nigeria to Rochester, NY— lugging every cassette tape, vinyl, and CD physically possible. My dad brought home hundreds of tapes. These tapes have some of the most obscure, underground music rarely available today. I started digitizing my father’s tapes to preserve and turn these special recordings into accessible, shareable digital archives. When he passed away in 2022, these tapes held his living essence. I worked to bring his powerful records to life.
Our Story,
We’re building a cultural memory infrastructure of vintage cassette tape recordings, most of which are being left behind by mass streaming and rapid technological shifts. People used to wait hours for their favorite song to play on the radio, as anxious fingers hovered over the cassette deck’s recorder buttons to capture the audio. I mean, the stakes for music were so high. You couldn’t bring the radio everywhere with you. There was no Spotify. No YouTube. But you could DIY music from the radio onto your cassette tapes and keep it forever.
“The Video Killed The Radio Star” was the very first music video played on MTV at 12:01AM August 1, 1981. The iconic 1979 track by The Buggles chronicled the slow death of the radio, as moving image television and music videos dominated the music scene. The world moved quickly. Radio boom boxes faded from the streets. Sleek bluetooth-powered soundbars replaced bulky home sound systems. Time disappeared.
ZACCH 903.9FM: My Father’s Archives
TAPES, AS MEMORY, presents Zacch 903.9 FM, the first station in the radio archive. These are some of my dad's vintage cassette tapes he lugged from Nigeria to the USA. Featuring rare recordings of the greatest LAGBAJA and excerpts of our A Cappella Church choir!
