OAKLAND, Calif. – Hundreds of audio cassettes sparkle like jewels in red felt-lined flight cases. Stacks of Soviet-pressed vinyl records bear liner notes in Dari, Russian, or English. No two are alike – the covers are bold, technicolor things with holographic sheen and vivid script.
The music itself feels uncanny, a stream of tablas and horns, electric guitars and synths. Modern sounds recorded on grainy, antiquated equipment.
This growing collection of over 1000 cassettes and 2000 vinyl records is cultivated by Omid J., aka OMJVinyls, an Oakland-based amateur archivist who, every night after his day job, scours the internet looking to acquire the remaining vestiges of Afghanistan’s musical past.
Once digitized, he shares the content on his site, Afghan Cassette Archive.
No simple task
Since the Taliban retook power in 2021, these relics of a time now long past have become highly illegal and are actively being destroyed within the country. Under Taliban rule, most music and Afghan artistic expression have been outlawed.
Exports, meanwhile, are also nearly impossible due to an ongoing conflict with Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan.
Given the current landscape, Omid’s online network of fellow Afghan music aficionados and archivists often find themselves going to extreme lengths to get their hands on prized recordings.
He sees what he’s doing as a form of resistance.
“The original reels for this music are all locked up in the archive of Afghanistan, but we don’t know what the Taliban will do. Like the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which they destroyed … they might do that with this cassette collection one day,” says Omid. “So that’s why what I’m doing is a form of resistance, because they don’t agree with preserving this stuff.”
Connecting to culture
A Hayward, California native, Omid J. (who asked to withhold his last name out of fear of potential reprisals by the Taliban or its sympathizers) has never been to Afghanistan, where both his parents were born.
Instead, he takes himself there through music, a passion he credits in part to his maternal grandfather, a Pashto poet.
“He used to tell me, ‘Hey, go play me a cassette.’ So little six-year-old me would just grab one, smiling, not knowing anything, and play it. Then he would start writing into the middle of the night. I always found that really cool,” says Omid.
He added, “This is a man who’s far away from his homeland, but he’s somehow trying to connect to it, and this is the music that’s inspiring him to connect to the culture.”
‘Culture robbers’
Omid attended medical school during the pandemic, a time when, he says, he sought to downplay his Afghan identity, to be “more American.” That later led to questions of belonging and his sense of place here. It was around this time, explains Omid, that he started seriously collecting Afghan tapes.
“Listening to these songs makes me feel a longing,” he says, “to see this homeland that I always hear about. Maybe one day.”
Omid first started acquiring cassettes and records through family, Ebay, and Discogs, an online physical music marketplace. But he became frustrated with what he describes as non-Afghan “culture robbers” — individuals who, like him, secure these rare tapes but then sell them online for exorbitant amounts. Others make phony copyright claims, preventing the music from reaching a wider audience.
Soon the coveted Afghan cassettes Omid sought out started to grow scarce, while YouTube clips got taken down for copyright infringement. So he decided to plunge deeper, trading with people for any ephemera they had. Many, he says, were eager to contribute to his project once he explained what it was.
Music smugglers
At first most of the collectors he got in touch with — many through Instagram — were in Germany and Iran. Starting around 2024, people in Pakistan and Afghanistan who clandestinely source the cassettes, like small shop owners and private collectors, started contacting Omid through his social media posts.
That’s when he began making orders for the rarest tapes – necessarily, through a smuggler.
“I know they say never trust people online, but I haven’t had a bad experience yet,” Omid jokes.
One of those people was an Afghan refugee living in the border region in Pakistan, who Omid affectionately calls “Uncle” in Dari (one of two official languages of Afghanistan, the other being Pashto). Together they got in touch with a tape collector in Kandahar, the Taliban heartland.
“He got a smuggler who bought a hundred cassettes. From there he would smuggle twenty at a time. He had a bag with cigarettes in it, and he would just put the cassettes in there and cross the border with no problem,” says Omid.
A fraught journey
The journey from Pakistan to Omid’s cassette archive is a proverbial minefield.
The border region separating Afghanistan and Pakistan is designated by the U.S. State Department as an illegal narcotics hub, restricting exports. This is also the site of ongoing clashes between Taliban and Pakistani forces, making life on the Pakistani side precarious for Afghans, including “Uncle.”
Then there are all the security checkpoints and x-rays that, says Omid, raise concerns about potential damage to the cassettes’ magnetic tape. Finally, President Trump’s tariffs raised shipping costs as the music made its way over three national borders before landing in Omid’s collection.
He grabs a new favorite, a track called Naro Naro Bia Bia — a love song the title of which translates to “Don’t Go, Come Here,” by the late singer, Zahir Howaida.
“If you sniff it, you can still smell the cigarettes,” Omid says, holding the cassette. “I like this tape because it combines Western and Eastern sounds… this guy used to experiment all the time.”
He says the feeling of hearing it for the first time made him giddy.
“I was very excited. Getting this tape, it feels like you’re finding a friend again,” explains Omid, adding there is also a touch of sadness in knowing the music has left its homeland.
“You know this tape was made in like 1975. The fact that it survived war and conflict and it made it here is very… I have no words to explain it.”
A return, of sorts
Professor Mejgan Massoumi is a historian at Carnegie Mellon University specializing in media archivism and Afghan cultural history through radio. Like others she connected with Omid through their shared passion for preserving Afghan music.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Omid Jahan || Minister of Information and Culture In-Exile (@omjvinyls)
“If this cultural material isn’t preserved,” she said, “it gets lost forever.”
As for the Afghan diaspora, the archive Omid has built harks back to a “time of nostalgia that predates, unfortunately, lots of horrible violence and decades of war,” explained Massoumi.
Many Afghans, she continues, “associate certain musicians from the 60s and 70s as a more peaceful time. Lots of the songs evoke complicated feelings of exile, complicated feelings of identity, complex love.”
Omid recalls once receiving a video from an Afghan man living here in the US who recorded his wife crying as she listened to the music, recalling her childhood. There is a strong desire to return for many Afghans, he says. His archive is a version of that return.
“When my mom listens to this music, she misses home and says she would love to see it again, but does not want to go back, because she wants to remember the good things from Afghanistan,” says Omid. “
Omid recently applied for a grant from UCLA’s Modern Endangered Archive Program. He says the funds would enable him to travel to Pakistan to digitize a friend’s 2000-unit collection there.
In the meantime, his new label, Analog Afghan, just dropped a reissue of tracks by Afghan musician Wahid Omid, pressed on 45 rpm vinyl.
“It’s best to preserve as much as possible,” says Omid.
Chris Alam is a California Local News Fellow with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
