27/08/2026
| Tribute to Moul L'K7 |
P h o t o S e r i e s
For decades, music was something tangible. It occupied shelves, travelled in suitcases and passed from one hand to another through vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs. You could hold an album, read its cover, rewind a tape with a pencil, make a mixtape for someone, or clutch a handful of cassettes and a trusty Walkman. Music was not simply heard; it was collected, exchanged, handled and lived with.
In Morocco, the cassette became particularly important from the late 1970s onward. By the early 1980s, tapes and cassette players had become widely available across the country, including in smaller cities and towns. Their affordability, portability and ability to be copied allowed music to circulate quickly, often beyond the reach of formal record distribution. Imported recordings could be duplicated locally, while Moroccan and Maghrebi artists increasingly found the cassette to be a practical way of reaching listeners. The tape was therefore not simply a new format; it became part of the infrastructure through which music travelled across Morocco.
At the centre of this world were figures like "Moul L'K7", cassette vendors and record store owners who acted as mediators between music and its listeners. They knew the artists, the songs and the tastes of their customers. In Morocco, these small shops and informal points of sale became places where people discovered new voices, requested particular songs, copied albums and built their personal collections. Some vendors could even reproduce recordings on demand, responding quickly to what listeners wanted to hear.
The cassettes themselves became informal archives of musical life, preserving fragments of popular culture, personal stories and collective memory. A cassette could carry the voice of an artist, but also the memory of the person who bought it, the shop where it was found, the friend who recommended it, or the family gathering where it was played.
The cassette eventually gave way to the CD, while the physical object gradually began to disappear. MP3 players and the iPod transformed music into digital files that could hold hundreds or thousands of songs in a pocket. Smartphones pushed this transformation even further: music no longer needed to be owned, stored or even physically encountered. Platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, Deezer and others turned it into an almost invisible, continuously accessible stream.
With this technological progression, something else may have been lost: the sense of music as something to value and keep. The ritual of choosing a record, searching through cassettes, exchanging a tape, reading an album cover or listening to an entire album has increasingly been replaced by instant access, algorithms, playlists and endless scrolling. What was once tangible, limited and carefully collected has become abundant, immediate and largely intangible.
Today, the transformation is entering another stage. Artificial intelligence can generate music within moments through tools such as Suno and similar platforms, raising new questions about authorship, craftsmanship and the value of human creation. As technology makes music easier to produce and consume, does something of its beauty, depth and sense of human connection risk becoming diluted?
"Tribute to Moul L'K7" is not simply an archive of a disappearing medium. It is a documentary reflection on the changing relationship between people and music.
Perhaps the question is no longer simply whether the cassette will return. It is whether, in an age of infinite access and machine-generated music, we will once again seek the tangible, imperfect and human qualities that once made music something to keep.
Oussama Hamama Photography ©
