Upon Closer Listening

Cassette tapes sourced in Lebanon, Armenia, and through community donations that trace the Armenian diaspora form the Analog Armenia archive.

Upon Closer Listening explores what it means to protect, revive, and interact with intangible heritage through a mixtape of Armenian music and sonic material originally found on cassette. These material artefacts safeguard what genocide could not physically destroy.

This mixtape is a varied catalogue of sounds and voices, documenting the breadth of Armenian experiences during more than a century in exile. The Armenian language, particularly the Western Armenian dialect, has persisted amid suppression, with its continued use reflecting an enduring resilience through which identity is retained. Ongoing colonial and geopolitical conditions still distance people and their sounds from their points of origin, producing an archive marked as much by displacement and interruption as by preservation and active efforts of recovery.

Alongside folk songs [1] and commercial music [2], you hear readings [3], children’s stories and revolutionary radio broadcasts, tracing practices of rebuilding and sustaining community across shifting geographies and circumstances. 

The entire work is first created through the digitisation of analogue media. Some pieces experience natural modification of frequencies, a symptom of use and degradation over time. Fragments of others are manipulated through techniques such as pitch-bending, echo, and reverb. These chance and deliberate interventions reflect the instability of memory, in recognition of histories that are fragmented, altered, and continually reconstructed. Rather than presenting memory as a fixed archive, the work foregrounds its volatility, mediation, reinterpretation, and continual reshaping through acts of listening, reproduction, and circulation.

Selected tracks 

[1] 00:38:27 - ‘Dzameret Hyousik’ by Nersik Ispiryan (b. Yerevan) – from the album Aravod Er (1996), a collection of Armenian folk songs from the countryside. 

[2] 00:36:58 - ‘Yares Knatz’ (1987) by Paul Baghdadlian (b. Aleppo) – prominent Armenian singer well-known for love songs, contributed heavily to Lebanon’s Armenian music scene. 

[3] 00:15:10 - Վանայ Ձայն [Vana Tsayn] (Voice of Van), reading of The Light Belt of Revolution by Vazken Shushanian – Recording from Radio Station, Bourj Hammoud, Beirut.