Listening guides · Four books · More on the way
Companion guides for the books that made you go and listen. One guide per book, each with its own colourway.
A book sends you off to listen. Nothing in the book helps you actually do it.
Every guide is a tracklist keyed to chapters, so you can read a page and hear it in the same sitting.
Welcome to Soundtrack The Page. This is something of a pet project, which came from an idea I had whilst reading Harry Sword’s incredible “Monolithic Undertow” for the second time. It occurred to me that I had no decent way to just click through to listen to any of the amazing music being referenced.
With that in mind, I set about creating my own personal guide — which is now the guide you see linked to below. From there, I am creating guides for other books I am either reading at present, or have read in the past. I hope you enjoy the guides as much as I have.
— darren
Four so far. Each one takes the book’s own colour and keeps it for the whole guide, so you always know which shelf you’re on.
Harry Sword · 2021
Monolithic Undertow
in search of sonic oblivion
The one that started all this. Sword follows the drone from ancient ritual and early minimalism through to doom, dub and everything that hums rather than hurries.
JR Moores · 2021
Electric Wizards
a tapestry of heavy music
Moores runs a single line through more than fifty years of distortion, from the late-sixties heavy underground out to the sludge, noise and psych that came after it.
Matthew Collin · 1997
Altered State
ecstasy culture and acid house
Collin’s account of how a drug and a drum machine rearranged British youth culture — Chicago, Ibiza, the Summer of Love, the warehouses, and the long argument with the law that followed.
Simon Reynolds · 1998
Energy Flash
a journey through rave music
Reynolds on the whole sprawl of it: Detroit and Chicago, Balearic, hardcore, jungle, gabba and the long comedown afterwards. The deepest guide on the site by some distance.
A hi-fi is a chain, and so is this. The book sends you somewhere, the guide tells you what it meant, and then you press play.
The book
Title, author, edition. Whatever made you pick it up in the first place.
The chapters
One row per chapter, with a note on what it covers and what it sent me looking for.
The listening
A playlist per chapter and one for the whole book. Anything you can’t stream gets a link to go and find it.
More guides
New ones go up as I finish them — sometimes from a book I’m reading now, sometimes from one I read years ago and never listened to properly. If there’s a book you think belongs here, I’d like to hear about it.