Format Friction by Gavin Williams is out now, offering the first book-length study to treat the shellac disc as a truly global format. Centered on the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the book follows the seventy-eight rpm shellac disc as it moved across continents and cultures, becoming the dominant sound medium of the early twentieth century while reshaping how music was made, circulated, and heard.
Using friction as both a physical force and a conceptual lens, Williams connects sound reproduction to labor, environment, and power, beginning with South Asian knowledge systems that underpinned the format’s development. Material history, political context, and music history intersect throughout the book, reframing a familiar object through the realities of extraction, industry, and listening practice. The result sharpens how technological culture is understood, grounding early recorded sound in the tangible conditions that made it possible.