ABSTRACT
Drawing from my ongoing research on shellac-based gramophone discs and engaging with art history and media archaeology, this essay illuminates the theoretical and practical implications of considering and following the materials of music (as distinguished from the ‘material culture of music’). It suggests that a focus on the critical resources of media – such as shellac, a plastic of insect origin cultivated in India, and central in the development of Berliner’s disc – productively dissolves the ‘hard’ or stable objects of technological history, allowing for previously repressed narratives to emerge and be acknowledged. Throughout, the chapter contends that to think about materials is always already to think about matters of heterogeneity, transformability, temporality and co-dependency. It argues that media resources are relational and become activated through material, social and historical processes of association and encounter. Rather than positing the raw materials of music as neutral substances divorced from historical and political times, the chapter notably sheds light on their entanglement with colonial and postcolonial practices of extractivism – and draws attention to their continuous reverberations in the present.
