This chapter focuses on the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, founded in 1900, and its development into an extensive collection of languages and music from around the world. Today part of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, some of the surviving recordings have received considerable scholarly criticism in recent years for their association with the Phonogramm-Archiv’s colonial and imperialist ventures in the early twentieth century. As this chapter shows, however, not only the recorded voices, but also the materials used to manufacture the phonograph cylinders in the early days of the Phonogramm-Archiv came from exploitative contexts—among them Brazilian carnauba wax and montan wax from Germany’s lignite mining areas, whose extraction caused considerable environmental damage in the respective regions and deprived the population of its livelihood. The chapter thus shows that the Phonogramm-Archiv pursued a strategy of dual, interwoven exploitation of cultural and material resources from all over the world. A key figure in this strategy was Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, director of the Phonogramm-Archiv from 1906 to 1932 and today considered a founding figure of comparative musicology. Hornbostel had originally trained as a chemist, which not only facilitated the mass production of wax cylinders for the Phonogramm-Archiv; Hornbostel’s method of “tonometric analysis” of music, so central to comparative musicology, was also informed by chemical-analytical methods.