Musicians in twenty-first century Israel perform memories of erased and marginalized Mizrahi cultural pasts. In their processes of remembering and reconstructing family and communal narratives and musics, many find themselves visiting the National Sound Archive of the National Library of Israel, which contains thousands of hours of ethnographic recordings, recorded both pre-1948 in their ancestors’ countries of origin and in early statehood Israel. The encounters between the musicians and the recordings present multiple vectors of relationships, with the musical materials, with the people who were recorded, and with the people who made the recordings, all mediated by the institution of the National Library of Israel. In this paper, based on my ethnographic work with a number of third-generation musicians who refer to a range of Yemeni and North African art forms, I address questions that emerge from their encounters within the archive, about its history, its resonance in the present day, and of emergent ethical and political allegiances. First, I explicate the history of the National Sound Archive, illuminating its co-construction with the field of musicology in Israel, the multiple ideological motivations of Orientalism, Zionism, and comparative studies held in tension in their mutual unfolding over time, and the distinct positionalities of Mizrahim and Palestinians. I tease out the multiple critical and affective resonances of the present-day encounters within and performances of the archive, highlighting tensions between preservation and erasure, community and nation, audibility and silence, as well as cultural and social familiarity and distance. Through these tensions, I interrogate the specific role of sound, and ask about its libidinal and fugitive qualities in the context of simultaneous preservation and erasure. Finally, I address questions of ethics and allegiances to the various characters, histories, structures, and institutions, confronted both by me – as both ethnomusicologist and remembering subject myself – and by the musicians. I refer to post-colonial scholarship on the archive (e.g., Amit, 2014), discourse on fugitivity and sound (e.g., Sterne, 2003), and on performance and the archive (e.g., Hochberg, 2018). I argue that, for these musicians, the contemporary National Sound Archive in Israel constitutes an ambivalent space in which they enact their multiple and sometimes contradictory responses to Mizrahi preservation and erasure, in their various allegiances and disobediences to the state, to their own marginalized communities, to the field of ethnomusicology, and to the national archival institution.