This story aired in the June 18, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
The Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in 2021, after the hasty conclusion to a 20 year U.S. occupation. Since then, music has been officially banned in the country. Musicians are driven underground, instruments are destroyed, and recordings are contraband.
Here in the East Bay, one Afghan-American is working hard to preserve what he can. He’s digitizing tapes he’s sourced from back home and posting them in an online database he started calling the Afghan Cassette Archive. But getting those tapes out of Afghanistan is not as simple as an online order… It's an illegal, expensive, and dangerous odyssey.
Here, we meet up with Omid J, aka OMJVinyls, at his Oakland studio to check out his rare collection.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: Every night after his day job, Omid J scours the internet looking to acquire the remaining vestiges of Afghanistan’s musical past.
OMID: I see myself as a regular person, a person who is an enjoyer of music and wants to preserve whatever is left of their culture because if I don't do it then who else will?
REPORTER: He’s hardly just a regular enjoyer of music though.
We’re in a small studio he rents in Oakland. Hundreds of cassettes sparkle like jewels in red felt-lined cases. Stacks of vinyl records bear liner notes in several languages. No two are alike –– the covers are bold, technicolor things with holographic sheen and vivid script.
Without me even having to ask, he opens one up.
Sound of song “Lalar” by Gorohe Baran and Fawad Ramez plays
REPORTER: The music itself sounds uncanny. It’s a stream of tablas and horns, electric guitars and synths. Modern instruments recorded on grainy, antiquated equipment.
Omid’s enthusiasm is infectious, like if you’ve ever been around a kid who plays guitar and can’t stop plucking it. As we talk, Omid can’t stop playing music. He keeps popping cassettes in the tape deck.
OMID: This is an assortment of cassettes from what you could call the “golden age” of Afghanistan music before the war happened.
REPORTER: That was during the 1960s and 70s, when the government invested heavily in radio and cultural production. A vibrant music scene formed. New, diverse pop music followed, which found influences from all parts of the world, and blended it with traditional styles.
It was a more peaceful time back then. Artists like the legendary Ahmed Zahir, the “Afghan Elvis,” exploded in popularity.
But the problem is, the cassettes Omid has are ephemeral. Tapes degrade easily on their own over time.
And besides that, these tapes are actively being destroyed.
Most music and artistic expression in Afghanistan has been outlawed by the Taliban. The original masters for most of this music have been locked up in the national radio and tv station’s archives in Kabul. And because of the Taliban’s history of destroying cultural artifacts, it is hard to predict the fate of that archive.
Omid likens it to the Buddhas of Bamiyan, colossal 2000 year old statues demolished by the Taliban in 2001.
"What I'm doing is a form of resistance, because they don't agree with preserving this stuff. Even if they say it’s history for now, the next day they’ll destroy it.” - Omid J
OMID: They destroyed that, because they were just enraged. They might do that with this collection, with these cassettes one day, so that's why what I'm doing is a form of resistance, because they don't agree with preserving this stuff. Even if they say it’s history for now, the next day they’ll destroy it.
REPORTER: That’s why he’s asked to withhold his last name, to protect himself and his family abroad.
Omid's parents are from Afghanistan. They came to the U.S. between the late 80s and early 90s, and settled in Hayward, where Omid was born and raised. He's never gotten to visit Afghanistan, though. Instead he takes himself there through his music, a passion he credits to his grandfather who lived with them.
OMID: He had a boombox, and he used to tell me, “Hey, go play me a cassette. So little five, six-year-old me would just go grab one, smiling, not knowing anything, and play it.
Sound of song ‘Qataghani Gichak’ plays
REPORTER: His grandfather was a Pashto poet. In their Hayward home, sitting in his wheelchair, he would stay up late into the night listening to his music and writing.
OMID: I always found that really cool and interesting, because 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. So anytime I do this stuff, I think of him actually. I think that’s where this comes from.
REPORTER: Omid was studying to get into medical school during the pandemic. But he realized that wasn’t his passion, so he began seeking out what he loved on the side: music.
He hunted down Afghan recordings anywhere he could, starting with family and local shops.
He quickly moved to the internet, bidding on tapes and vinyl on Ebay and Discogs, an online physical music marketplace.
He changed course and got a day job in medical research, and used that income to buy more tapes. He’s been able to find some really rare stuff that he says even other Afghans are surprised to see.
OMID: And even cassettes like these, they’re very hard to find because when people left Afghanistan they couldn’t take much with them. So everyone just left it there. Even when you feel these cassettes and smell them, there’s a lot of dirt in them because they’ve been there for a long time.
REPORTER: He started posting what he found on Instagram, and explored niche online forums where he found other aficionados from places like Germany and Iran, two countries with some of the biggest Afghan populations.
Then clandestine collectors in Pakistan and Afghanistan started contacting Omid through his social media.
He says many were eager to contribute to his project once he explained what it was.
OMID: What’s funny is when you find one person who collects you just find all of them.
REPORTER: One of those people was an Afghan refugee living in the border region in Pakistan, who Omid affectionately calls something like “Uncle” in Dari.
Uncle runs a tape shop in Pakistan. He reached out to Omid and said he knew a way to get fresh music from a tape collector in the city of Kandahar.
Sound of song “Tanbur Zherbaghali” by Najiba and Bangicha plays
OMID: He got a smuggler, we paid the smuggler. After we paid the smuggler he went into Afghanistan, he went to Kandahar, which is the Taliban heartland. He bought, at the time, a hundred cassettes. From there he would smuggle twenty at a time. He had a bag with cigarettes in there, and he would just put the cassettes in there and cross the border with no problem. But once we had the 100 cassettes, we then had a new dilemma.
REPORTER: The journey from Pakistan to Omid’s cassette archive is a proverbial minefield.
Uncle can’t ship directly to the U.S, so he includes Omid’s tapes in shipments to collectors in other places like Dubai. That collector separates and distributes the tapes to other collectors around the world in places like Germany, where they are then finally sent on to Omid in California.
Along the way, the cassettes have to pass through security measures and X-Rays, which Omid says can damage their precious magnetic tape.
In addition to an initial bribe at the Pakistan border, the collectors have to pay the customs fees for every border crossed.
If that wasn’t enough, Uncle’s at risk of being deported because of his refugee status in Pakistan.
The music itself is an immigrant, surviving a lifetime of war, crossing checkpoints, and enduring the dirt of 4 national borders, to end up here in Omid’s reverent hands.
OMID: If you smell it, it still smells like cigarettes. I don’t know if you want to smell it...
REPORTER: He’s holding up one bright yellow tape from that shipment. He pops it into the deck to play for me.
Sound of song “Naro Naro Bia Bia” by Zahir Howaida
The track is called “Naro Naro Bia Bia” by the late singer, Zahir Howaida. It roughly translates as “Don’t Go, Come Back.”
This tape was made in 1977. It has seen two invasions and a civil war. The fact that it survived over 50 years of near-endless conflict to end up in his hands is something that makes Omid emotional.
OMID: When I heard this song after I got these tapes, I was just giddy. I was very excited, because nobody has ever heard this song. Getting this tape, it feels like you're finding a friend again, like a friend of a family you lost a long time ago. And it's very happy, you know, you feel very happy because you feel like this is a friend you've been waiting to bring here for a while. But it's also sad because you're taking them away from the homeland, but they're not safe to be in the homeland, you know.
REPORTER: Omid says he shared some of his tapes with a friend, an Afghan man living here in the US. The man replied with a video of his wife crying as she listened to the music. She was remembering her childhood.
There is a strong desire to return for many Afghans, he says. His archive is a version of that return.
OMID: When are we going to go back? I don’t know. It’s a sad reality. It’s always interesting to see what people feel because it’s a lot of melancholy and the feeling of missing home. 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, not all the stuff that happened.
REPORTER: Omid is hard at work expanding his project. He 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 and maybe even enable him to see Afghanistan for the first time.
In the meantime, Omid says he wants to re-release music by Afghan musicians living in the diaspora. Not only to expose the music to a wider audience, but also to help the musicians financially. He’s just gotten that project, a record label called Analog Afghan, off the ground. All sales are a 50-50 split with the artists.
OMID: So as I collect this stuff, I feel like I’m rediscovering myself in a way. Listening to these songs makes me feel a longing of wanting to see this homeland that I always hear about. But the only way to do it is through listening to tapes for now, listening to audio. Maybe one day, I can go and see the homeland. If not, then at least I have all this stuff and I can just sit and listen to the music and enjoy my life.”
Sound of song “Gudar Ta Rwaraw” by Qamar Gula and Shah Wali
REPORTER: So while Omid may seem like someone obsessed with the past, his mission is in service of the future –– the future of his culture, his people, and his music.
A print version of this story was originally published by American Community Media. You can read it here.
You can find more information about Omid and the Afghan Cassette Archive by visiting his site.