Farooq Ahmad Shaksaaz presses a button on his 1970 Sharp cassette player, and with a hefty clack the machine whirrs to life.

Listened to by artisans as they work or at gatherings of Sufi music aficionados, cassette players hold sway in ...

By the time the great Nusrat died of a heart attack in 1997 at the woefully young age of 48, he was just beginning to enjoy ...

Shaksaaz, a tailor in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar, inherited his passion for local Sufi music from his grandfather along with a meticulously preserved collection of audio cassette tapes from the ...

Even today, the region’s traditional Sufi music gatherings are often recorded only on the disappearing audio format, which was widely used from the 1970s to the 1990s.