This last chapter retraces some of the afterlives of shellac – and gramophone records – in the contemporary era, at a time when it has fallen into obsolescence as a media material but continues to be an important symbolic resource or matrix in sound and visual art. It discusses the works of contemporary artists (or, to use a helpful German coinage, ‘research artists’) and designers who have explicitly and systematically engaged with shellac through the knowledge of its deep media-material history – while moving beyond the rigid confines of historical retelling. In doing so, the chapter also highlights what multidimensional and intersensory modes of thinking may contribute to our understanding of media – in other words, it acts as a supplement to what came before, allowing us to ‘actualise’ the history of the material. This is not to say, as already noted in Chapter 4 in relation to the theses of Catherine Malabou and Esther Leslie, that a material excavation can ever be equated with a strict ‘return’ to previous historical stratas.2 Despite the effective endurance of materials, no repetition is ever possible: the previous chapters have insisted on the plasticity and transformational potentials of shellac to illuminate, in turn, the mutability and fragility of cultural formations themselves. In what follows, I would like to argue that contemporary sound and visual artists (not unlike their interwar predecessors discussed in Chapter 3) fashion valuable ways of hearing, thinking about and looking at the surfaces and substrates of the contemporary era. Their close, intimate involvement with the materiality of objects and archives may allow them to coin in turn a more expansive dialogue with the world than conventional academic researchers may feel authorised to form. This work is without end.