A growing body of scholarship has approached the history of Arab and Middle Eastern cinemas through their embeddedness in robustly South-South circuits of films, technology, labor, and aesthetics. Much of this work has focused on commercial industries, to highlight the extent to which various transregional industries (e.g., those of Tehran, Bombay, Istanbul, Cairo, and Dubai) have historically been far more intertwined than might be evident in accounts focused on a single industry or national context. Building on this work, I turn to the material and affective presence of Hindi film songs in Arab “city” films produced amidst a 1970s-1980s boom in audiocassette tapes. I focus in this paper on Algerian cult feature OMAR GATLATO (Merzak Allouache, 1974) and Sudanese experimental short AL MAHATTA (Eltayeb Mahdi, 1989). While the films may initially seem to have little in common, both films render frenetic encounters with/in the city (Algiers and Khartoum, respectively) through a meta-narrative of mediated sounds. Hindi film songs, in particular, unfold as ineffable, feminine seductions of cosmopolitan encounters and technological promise, which enchant the masculine protagonists. The films record a history of Hindi film songs’ presence in soundscapes of the everyday, while simultaneously drawing out the Hindi film songs’ associations with star-crossed desires. My paper builds on Kaveh Askari’s (2022) materially-focused historiography of media circulation, Maya Boutaghou’s (2021) analysis of cinematic soundscapes of Algiers, and Andrew Simon’s (2022) and Peter Manuel’s (1993) studies of cassette cultures in Egypt and India, respectively. Through documentary proclivities that highlight processes of recording and mediation, OMAR GATLATO and AL MAHATTA index both urban soundscapes revolutionized by cassette tapes, and the everyday handling of sonic material that in turn came to infuse and inspire filmmakers’ own formal experiments with film sound. By looking closely at the two films’ formal and narrative engagements with Hindi film songs in their respective soundscapes, I draw out an intermedial, transregional history of cinema and cassette technology that opens up new perspectives on experimental and “city” films in histories of Arab cinema.