This book charts the unsettled media cultures and deep time of shellac, retracing its journey from the visual to the sonic, and back again. Each chapter unveils a situated moment in the long history of shellac – travelling from its early visual culture to Emile Berliner’s discovery of its auditory properties through to its recycling in contemporary art and design practices. Unforeseen correspondences between artefacts as diverse as mirrors, seals, gramophone discs and bombs are revealed. With its combinatory approach and commitment to material thinking, Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture insists on moments of contact, encounter, and transformation. The book notably addresses the colonial unconscious underpinning the early transnational recording industry, highlighting the multiple gestures and forms of labour entombed within the production of the 78rpm disc. Roy explores shellac as a concrete substance, as well as the malleable stuff of which stories, histories and modern imaginings were made – and unmade.

Elodie A. Roy is a media and material culture theorist with a specialism in the history of phonography. She is the author of Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove, and the co-editor (with Eva Moreda Rodríguez) of Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890-1945.

Introduction: From material culture to the materials of culture
Chapter 1. Sheen: Early stories and circulation of shellac
Chapter 2. Crackle: Assembling the record
Chapter 3. Mirrors: Phono-fetishism and intersensory visions
Chapter 4. Detonations: Shellac at war
Chapter 5. Shards: Waste, obsolescence, and contemporary remediations
Conclusion: Sonic sculptures
Index