Between the two World Wars, the recording industry exploded across North Africa. By the mid-1920s, this meant that tens of thousands of records made their way across colonial and imperial borders annually. The growth in musical production and consumption owed to a number of factors: the groundwork laid by a first generation of Jewish and Muslim impresarios, the entrance of major European record labels, the advent of the microphone which improved sonic fidelity, and finally, the arrival of a Beirut-born company by the name of Baidaphon. To oversee their activities in North Africa, the Baida family dispatched Théodore Khayat, a young relative of one of the founding brothers, to settle and set up operations in Casablanca. While initially invited in by the French authorities, who believed that recorded music served as a distraction from a set of burgeoning nationalist politics, Baidaphon’s growing catalog of subversive song soon proved problematic, triggering a surveillance apparatus that would remain in place even past Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian independence. But Khayat’s relationship to the North African music-makers and music-purveyors behind such revolutionary sounds was sometimes equally vexed. Shortly after Baidaphon’s appearance on the scene, partnerships with local artistic directors, agents, and musicians soured. More than just a story of anticolonialism and its soundscape, this paper interrogates the multifaceted relationship of a Middle Eastern record label to an unfamiliar North African terrain. Whereas much of the scholarship on transregionality in MENA has concerned itself with the ways in which the Maghrib has looked to the Mashriq for inspiration, political or otherwise, this presentation considers how a figure and firm from the Middle East navigated questions of musical style, language, and gender in North Africa itself. Importantly, it also pays attention to the perspectives of a range of North African actors. To do so, this paper comes to a particular focus on the interwar case of Raissa Embarka, a Moroccan berberophone artist who sued Baidaphon in order in order to win freedom from a recording contract she deemed culturally and linguistically unfair. Indeed, far from a seamless entry into the overlapping music markets in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, a robust set of archives related to Baidaphon––from their own phonograph records to civil court records––suggest a more complicated picture of east-west connections, one in which women, for example, played a central role.