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J. J. Anselmi

Doom, sludge and post-metal, from Birmingham’s bombed-out factories to the present. The first book here with no discography at all, so the prose is the whole of it: thirty pages, each carrying the records and songs that chapter names, in the order it names them, with the sentence that does the naming.

Anselmi’s own typography carries over — a release in italic, a song in “quotation marks” — which is also how the guide tells them apart in the first place. Artists and years come from asking MusicBrainz about every title and believing it only where the passage names that artist too: a book that writes about one band for pages at a time rarely puts the name next to the record.

Matt Anniss

Bleep techno — the Yorkshire sound of bass so low it moved the room, and what British dance music built on top of it. Nineteen pages follow the book: each chapter lists the records that chapter names, in the order it names them, with the sentence that does the naming underneath. 365 records, every one with its context. One chapter names none at all, and says so; it is about the miners’ strike.

Anniss closes the book with a Bleepography, a chapter-by-chapter list of recommendations with labels and years — the first book here to have done that work already. It is the twentieth page, entire and in his order, and its labels and years settle how every record in the guide is billed. What it is not is a substitute for reading the chapters.

Dan Charnas

Charnas explains what J Dilla actually did to time — a third feel, neither straight nor swung, with the notes left where neither one expects them — and then follows it out of Detroit and into everything after.

Sixteen chapters carry the music the book names, in the order it names it — and most of it is not J Dilla, because Charnas spends his time on what was sampled, what his friends made and what came after. Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag opens chapter two; Queen and Jackie Wilson are on the same page. A seventeenth carries his Selected Discography entire, 305 records and eight batches, including the long tail of posthumous releases no chapter mentions.

A record earns its place one of three ways: Charnas lists it in his discography, or the sentence names its artist outright (“Nina Simone’s I Loves You, Porgy”), or MusicBrainz has a release or recording of that name credited to somebody the passage names. Those last two are what let the guide carry the music around him as well as his own.

Mark Prendergast

One line from Mahler to Moby, and the widest span on the site: Satie and Debussy at one end, Aphex Twin and Air at the other. Prendergast ends every entry with a LISTENING section, and the first four books here carry those and nothing else — the chapters name hundreds more records in passing, but those are reference points rather than recommendations.

The fifth book is his own closing list, the hundred he would take to a desert island. 903 records in all.

You can now follow the site rather than checking it. feed.xml carries one entry per guide and nothing else — no chapter updates, no corrections, just a new book when there is one. Paste it into whatever you read feeds in.

Tim Lawrence

The disco one, and the biggest yet: 532 records across ten chapters. Lawrence’s book has a discography in the back that lists everything he mentions, which made this the most complete guide on the site — and it carries something the others don’t. Lawrence reprints twenty-two club playlists, so where a record has no sentence around it you get the room instead: on the select discography for Paradise Garage 1977–78, chosen by Larry Levan.

Dan Sicko

Detroit. Sicko’s book has no discography at all, so every record here was found in the text itself and then checked by hand, one by one, against the page.

David Toop

Toop drifting from Debussy to ambient house. A hard one to build — he writes about music sideways, and half the work was telling a record he was discussing from a record he merely named.

Julian Cope

Cope in full flow on the German underground. His fifty-album list is famous; this follows the whole book rather than just the list.

Michael E. Veal

King Tubby, Lee Perry and the mixing desk as an instrument. Songs first, then albums, in the order Veal names them.

Simon Reynolds

The deepest guide on the site by some distance — Detroit and Chicago through Balearic, hardcore, jungle and gabba.

Matthew Collin

Acid house, ecstasy and the long argument with the law that followed.

JR Moores

Fifty years of distortion, from the late-sixties heavy underground out to sludge and noise.

Harry Sword

The one that started all this, built on a second reading of Sword’s book because there was no good way to hear what he was describing.