Traces Luciano Berio’s interest in Central African music, dramatized by the composer’s unique approach to instrumental technique in Coro. The empirical origins of this technique are followed aspects of its formal musical articulation in both the original Banda Linda music and in Coro are demonstrated. The aesthetic dimensions of Coro are assessed, and an aspect of the music’s afterlife in Western intellectual history, notably in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is examined. The way that music and sound circulate within different regimes of meaning and value are tracked with a particular interest in retrieving the often tributary and ephemeral phenomena found in geographically remote cultures that, for complex reasons, are systematically written out of world history.