Chapter 1 introduced the early uses of lac and shellac as visual media. It uncovered a first, pre-mediatic layer in the history of the material, charting the long period before it fully became a ‘medium’ (as well as an organised industry) in the modern sense of the term. In this chapter, I continue to track shellac's transformative journey, examining another layer in the history of the material, and attending to its symbolic-material (re)emergence as a new (sonic) medium in the context of early phonography. This chapter focuses especially on the US where the shellac-based gramophone disc was developed by Emile Berliner in the second half of the 1890s. It asks how this arch-material of culture became distinctly modernised, domesticated and westernised (or even Americanised) through its sociocultural and industrial association with Berliner's gramophone disc. The latter, an easily reproducible media artefact, is often presented as single-handedly and magically ‘pav[ing] the way for the development of a new consumer industry predicated on the mass production of music’. But this technological breakthrough simultaneously marked a moment of erasure. The early visual stories of shellac were largely silenced and discarded as the 78rpm disc began journeying into the lives and imaginaries of millions of listeners. Other stories were encoded – or inscribed – into the material, with previous understandings becoming increasingly faint and inaudible.