Music Maps

This is just a bit of fun but I like the way it’s set out: The Map of Metal. OK, so it steals the sub-genre definitions from Wikipedia but it’s a nice touch to have a selection of playable tracks that can quickly give you an idea if Tech Death or Mathcore is your thing (or neither if you have actually have ears, or eyes in the case of Visual Kei).

For a music geek like me, I can get lost for hours playing with something like this – despite its lack of nuance. As I am writing this, I keep getting sidetracked looking up bands on the genre lists and queuing them up in Spotify for later listening.

Like electronic music, metal has an absurd number of sub-genres. Two people who like “metal” could have completely incompatible tastes with one into black and funeral doom, the other into sludge and stoner. It really does help to have a guide through the maze of labels we’ve dreamed up to understand this unruly music.

I found something kinda similar which while looking absolutely terrible even for a 2005 site does a reasonable job of navigating the labyrinth of electronic music: Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. I can’t let slide though his denunciation of Jump Up Jungle – it used to tear the roof off Jungle nights in the early to mid 90s (the examples he provides are a bit shit though).

Final map of the post is a classic: XKCD’s Map of the Internet