At the turn of the twentieth century, shellac became primarily known and experienced as a material and medium of sound rather than of vision. The sonic and visual realms, however, were still entwined in more ways than one. While the first two chapters of this book scrutinise early trade networks, production and labour practices, this chapter engages with larger themes. It examines phonographic consumption and artistic expressivity in the interwar period, resituating phonography within larger historical debates on materiality and technological modernity. This deliberately broader emphasis also serves an important narrative purpose, mimicking the ways in which shellac became culturally absorbed in the sphere of everyday life between the wars (to the point of becoming invisible). The material momentarily disappears, only to reappear in unforeseen assemblages. I approach interwar phonograph culture as a fluid and multisensory object of study, wavering between the auditory and the visual realm. The interwar period, with its heightened intermediality and theoretical vitality, encourages us to explore the changing and asymmetrical – yet not necessarily conflicting – relationships between different regimes of perception. It notably prompts us to consider the vibrant persistence of vision within auditory knowledge, while evidencing how the frontiers between the sonic and the scopic, rather than being harshly defined, were always already porous and negotiable.

As well as introducing a thematic shift, this chapter also proposes a geographical displacement. Moving away from Anglophone countries to continental Europe, it principally engages with Germany and France where phonographic consumption drastically increased following the introduction of electrical recording in 1925.