Listening guides · Thirteen 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.
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 started creating guides for other books I am either reading at present, or have read in the past. The guides aren’t perfect but I am ironing out issues as I find them. All music links to YouTube for two reasons: first, a lot of the music in the books covered isn’t on streaming music services. Second, YouTube is freely accessible to all, which I felt was important here.
I hope you enjoy these guides as much as I have; for me they basically meant I could have the guide open on my phone, checking out the music as I was reading about it.
If there are any books you’d particularly like to see a guide created for, drop me a line: [email protected].
— darren
In reverse order, newest first. Thirteen 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.
J. J. Anselmi · 2024
Doomed to Fail
the incredibly loud history of doom, sludge, and post-metal
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.
Matt Anniss · 2019
Join the Future
bleep techno and the birth of british bass music
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.
Dan Charnas · 2022
Dilla Time
the life and afterlife of j dilla, the hip-hop producer who reinvented rhythm
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.
Mark Prendergast · 2000
The Ambient Century
from mahler to moby — the evolution of sound in the electronic age
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.
Tim Lawrence · 2003
Love Saves the Day
a history of american dance music culture, 1970–79
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.
Dan Sicko · 2010
Techno Rebels
the renegades of electronic funk
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.
David Toop · 1995
Ocean of Sound
aether talk and imaginary worlds
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.
Julian Cope · 1995
Krautrocksampler
one head’s guide to the great kosmische musik
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.
Michael E. Veal · 2007
Dub
soundscapes and shattered songs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.