Magnetic tape follows the contours of the twentieth century in striking ways, from the overtly sonic and musical to less obvious political and social transformations. This introductory article sets the tone for this special issue, an effort to connect discrete histories of tape through a focus on its materialities. We posit the existence of a phonographic regime that coheres around a loose set of assumptions that often appear in tandem with broad claims about what ‘sound recording’ or even ‘analogue media’ are. This regime dates back to the invention of phonography but persists through many contemporary histories of sound recording. We challenge the regime by thinking with and through tape recording. One of tape's critical media operations, ‘rewind’, serves as a central focus for our push-back against the regime. As a button-interface, it highlights the physical engagement of humans with materialities, including the corporal labours of using technology, with iconography that digital technologies still employ. As a mechanism of respooling, it points to the industrial histories of various spooling forerunners from textiles to film reels. As we explore its cultural techniques in musical practices, we consider rewind, above all, as a temporal gesture that offers new paths backward into history.

This article offers a history of the compact cassette in Poland from 1963 to 2015, focusing on its vibrant presence as the medium of choice for unofficial musical culture. I explore tapes’ capacity to reveal a history of everyday musical and technological fluencies: as a sonic archive they offer a window into networked epistemologies of sound under state socialism. Listening to homemade tapes – a process that builds on ethnographic encounters with their makers – I explore the work we can hear across the medium's noisy recordings and stress their position at the crossroads of musicology's methodologies. Tape's reusability, so carefully explained in historical anecdotes and technical manuals in the 1960s, facilitated democratic debate for the social movements of the 1980s. The format's fungibility and plurality made it not only a convenient conduit for discussion, but also a medium that – in form and substance – modelled the importance of dissent, revision, and return in political discourse.

This essay offers a media archeology of the cacophonous sounds and songs of the occupational strikes at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk, Poland. Political action over the course of August 1980 led to the formation and legalization of Solidarity, the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The Polish case study provides a model for the study of music and political activism that brings together history, sound, and music studies, and prompts a broader examination of listening, singing, and collective action. In their immediate wake, the successful protests stimulated celebration, critical analysis, and documentary effort. Across the initial written, recorded, and filmed accounts of the strikes, I observe a pervasive effort to invest sound with the power to authenticate these records as grass-roots history. Such chronicles, which I theorize as “sound documents,” draw attention to the important yet multivalent presence of sound and music in the project of collective opposition to state socialism in Poland through the 1980s. Two ambitious sound documents—an eclectic almanac and a radio montage—form the basis of a variegated account of the highly mediatized soundscape of the Polish strikes. They reveal the significance of anthems and simultaneously underscore the lack of sonic coherence in Gdańsk. Through the sound document, music emerges as a crucial tool through which to rethink and reconfigure the cultural history of collective action.

The introduction defines “political action” and “solidarity” theoretically, as frameworks for organizing and dispersing the relationship between music and protest. It also introduces the Polish opposition to state socialism, giving an overview of the political agents (activists, critics, citizens, priests, bureaucrats, Party members, journalists) who are the main protagonists of this history and who guide the musics and scenes upon which the book focuses. One cabaret anthem, Jan Pietrzak’s “So That Poland Will Be Poland,” serves as an orientation point. The song’s text, key performances in Warsaw, and use by the US Information Agency for propaganda give insight into national and international perspectives on the Solidarity movement and its historiography from the 1980s into the present.

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