Anselmi appends no discography, so the prose is the whole of it: thirty chapters carrying every record and song the book names, in the order it names them. Releases in italic, songs in quotation marks, exactly as he sets them.

Eighteen chapters and an introduction, each carrying the records that chapter names in the order it names them. Anniss’s own Bleepography — the chapter-by-chapter list he ends the book with — is the twentieth page, entire.

Charnas explains what J Dilla actually did to time — a third feel, neither straight nor swung — and then follows it out of Detroit. Sixteen chapters of the music the book names, from the Maple Leaf Rag onward, and a seventeenth carrying his Selected Discography entire.

Prendergast runs one line from Mahler to Moby and ends every entry with a LISTENING section. This guide carries those and nothing else — the records the book actually tells you to go and hear.

Lawrence traces disco back to a Valentine’s Day party in a Manhattan loft and forward into everything that followed — the twelve-inch, the record pool, the remix, and the DJ as an author rather than a jukebox.

Sicko puts Detroit back at the centre of a story the world had started telling without it — Cybotron, Metroplex, Transmat and UR, and techno as a continuation of funk rather than a break from it.

Toop drifts from Debussy hearing gamelan in 1889 to ambient, dub, Sun Ra and the whale song of the deep — a book about listening rather than genres, and the century that learned to swim in sound.

The book that sent a generation looking for Faust and Neu!. Cope in full evangelical flow on the German underground — the communes, the labels, and the fifty records he thinks you need.

Veal on Jamaica’s great act of sonic dismantling — King Tubby, Lee Perry, Errol Thompson and Scientist taking finished songs apart at the desk, and what the pieces went on to do everywhere else.

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.

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.

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.

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.