Cultural histories of the Maghrib have tended to privilege the national, lay focus on the vertical relationship between metropole and colony, and give pride of place to the visual. This paper seeks to attune the historical ear to the North African soundscape in order to make audible a different phenomenon: the horizontal movement of musicians and musical recordings across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia which proliferated in the interwar period and frequently rendered colonial borders into borderlands. That process, in which a music-maker like the Algerian artist Lili Labassi, this paper’s focal point, performed in Maghribi capitals to the east and west of his native Oran and in which his popular “Lellah yal ghadi lessahra” (O you, who is going to the Sahara) was recorded in Algiers in the late 1930s, pressed in Paris, shipped back to Algeria, moved overland into Morocco at Oujda, and then fanned out across the French protectorate – where it was soon banned, makes questions of border-crossing central to North African history. The explosion of record sales in North Africa in the 1920s, along with the emergence of indigenous recording outfits, not only expanded the reach of musicians like Labassi but so too drew the ire of French officialdom. The spread of broadcast radio by decade’s end and the ensuing “war of the airwaves,” the Arabic radiophonic battle initiated by fascist Italy and aimed at undermining French control in North Africa, brought a surveillance regime to bear on the Maghrib which soon served to police listening. The erection of censorship regimes in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, competing and uneven, further criminalized music. This paper follows the repeated ban on Lili Labassi’s “O you, who is going to the Sahara” in Morocco between 1938 and 1940 in order to answer questions related to what colonial and subaltern actors heard in the music of the interwar Maghrib. In other words, why was Labassi’s disc censored in Morocco but not Algeria? What attracted listeners to the record in question? More broadly, how do fears of and interventions in music inform our understanding of power and subversion? In reading against the archival grain of intelligence briefs, confidential memos, and search and seizure reports – and listening to the music itself, this paper allows for long ignored actors and licentious spaces to gain a foothold in the narrative while demonstrating the need to listen across the Maghrib in order to narrate within it.