A little history for folks seeing this for the first time: Ishkur has been publishing and updating this for over 25 years.
Truly one of the best artifacts of "the old internet". This gives me nostalgia. So many late nights as a teenager learning about the music I loved that seemed so inaccessible where I grew up. Thank you, Ishkur.
I'm glad that the "new" (post-Flash) version keeps some of the sarcasm from before, even if he toned down the level of spite that he had against some subgenres.
There's too many websites trying to be neutral and respectful, which is great, but humanity also needs subjective, opinionated rants about music. After all, music wouldn't even exist without the emotions that it inspires, an that includes negative emotions from boredom to mockery. Also, that's what makes this website fun to read in the first place.
I love this page to bits and I wish Ishkur would update it with more recent genres. Like where’s the amapiano, afro house, brazilian phunk, even future bass (which is half ancient at this point) isnt featured. His commentary is usually hilarious and spot-on so I’d love to read his takes on those.
Yeah this is a seriously a great resource especially in how it goes back to the early days. I didn't immediately find an, "entry" for Delia Derbyshire but Daphne Oram is there. I remember spending hours on Wikipedia as a kid doing research trying to develop an involved understanding of what drove innovation in electronic music. This will put a future, "me" that much further along. Great work.
I've come accross this website a few times but only now clicked on the hamburger menu and then on "how to use" to learn that learned that you had to zoom in and click on a "button" (some kind of polygon approximating a circle?) to listen to the music. I think I tried clicking on the titles before and concluded that it didn't work.
"Psydub is what the crusty hippies listen to when they get tired of dancing. Or when the drugs wear off. Or when they choose horse tranquilizers instead of LSD."
Man I went straight for psydub info. Back about 5 years ago I stumbled onto so some really interesting “psydub” playlists on Spotify with very strange song names and I thought I’d really found something good. Then poof! they disappeared one day and nothing labeled “psydub” seems to hit the mark and I don’t know what the hell that stuff was that disappeared.
> The late 70s binged on Disco like Charlie Sheen with an 8-ball of coke. Just about every legendary rock band released a Disco record or at least toyed with its aesthetics at one time or another: Kiss, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Queen, Neil Young, Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney. It was everywhere, it was popular, and you couldn't find a single radio station that wasn't playing it.
> All this animosity culminated in the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Chicago's Comisky Park in July, 1979 -- a radio promotion held between the games of a baseball double header that caused so much damage the second game was forfeit.
This looks like it must have taken FOREVER to compile - deep appreciations for Ishkur for putting this together. I'm a huge chiptune fan so was happy to hear Rob Hubbard [1] come up on there as well.
I was initially a little miffed to not see Garage House and then I noticed that they have it as a separate branch from "traditional" house and you know what, I'm okay with that. It's more correct as Garage House really derives from the music played at places like Paradise Garage and The Loft, which pre-dates traditional Chicago house.
And then there's Ron Hardy at Chicago's Warehouse who played both.
this is one of my all time fave internet properties. it never gets old... and somehow it's still being updated?? new version looks nice, but i do miss that late 90s aesthetic from before...
This is wild. Just a couple weeks ago I was describing this site to someone and assumed it was lost to time. Amazing it is still around. Thanks for sharing!
Essential Mix opened my early 2000s teenage world to so much more electronic music. Good memories of downloading sets via Napster and manually recording on to cassettes to listen to in my '95 Saturn. What a weird statement.
for old electronic music - Youtube, honestly. the algorithm is pretty good for finding old electronic music. like if youtube recommends me some random old 7 minute song with nothing but a picture of a record, there's a good chance I'm gonna like it at this point.
I'm on some of the oink/what successors and honestly, it's so hard to build ratio that it makes me not really like them at all.
> I'm on some of the oink/what successors and honestly, it's so hard to build ratio that it makes me not really like them at all.
You might have some success remaking rips others have made using the same settings for the rips and encodes, and then letting your torrent client recheck the existing torrent against your version of the files. I’ve also had success contacting filesharing-friendly artists and getting new and unreleased albums and tracks and building ratio more directly that way.
mark the timeline by instrument release date, these evolution lines are nonsense. The TR808, TR909, SP1200, and MPC2000 release dates had more to do with the changes in sound of these genres.
Reading this at 10 was like when Neo gets the kungfu program loaded into his brain. Completely mind blowing. The wildest music I had heard was Mandy Moore on the radio. And now there is a whole new horizon, with acid and 808s and sampling and breakbeats. It’s hard to imagine what I’d be listening to now without Iskur.
It's a nice website, but when I click on any music genre label, my Firefox asks: "Allow music.ishkur.com to use your HTML5 image data? This may be used to uniquely identify your computer."
AFAIK that warning is "scripts on this page will capture image data from the window viewport, which in turn can be used to fingerprint you because of how rendering works"
If you want more than samples, he's compiled a lot of 1-2 hour genre specific mixes here: https://www.mixcloud.com/Ishkur/
Plus the one 15 hour mix across genres: https://www.mixcloud.com/Ishkur/the-longplay-15/
The file linked on https://www.mixcloud.com/Ishkur/the-longplay-15/ is giving a 404, but can be found here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240226032906/http://ishkur.com...
A little history for folks seeing this for the first time: Ishkur has been publishing and updating this for over 25 years.
Truly one of the best artifacts of "the old internet". This gives me nostalgia. So many late nights as a teenager learning about the music I loved that seemed so inaccessible where I grew up. Thank you, Ishkur.
I'm glad that the "new" (post-Flash) version keeps some of the sarcasm from before, even if he toned down the level of spite that he had against some subgenres.
There's too many websites trying to be neutral and respectful, which is great, but humanity also needs subjective, opinionated rants about music. After all, music wouldn't even exist without the emotions that it inspires, an that includes negative emotions from boredom to mockery. Also, that's what makes this website fun to read in the first place.
I love this page to bits and I wish Ishkur would update it with more recent genres. Like where’s the amapiano, afro house, brazilian phunk, even future bass (which is half ancient at this point) isnt featured. His commentary is usually hilarious and spot-on so I’d love to read his takes on those.
“It sounds like a bunch of DJ’s dared each other to set their drum machines to BPM=1000”
That has been my favorite line from this for decades (at least that’s how I remember it going).
We were actually having a discussion about this earlier. Perhaps you could chime in as you've got, "a handle on the thing."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395396 (ctrl + f, "Velvet Underground" to find relevant posts)
Yeah this is a seriously a great resource especially in how it goes back to the early days. I didn't immediately find an, "entry" for Delia Derbyshire but Daphne Oram is there. I remember spending hours on Wikipedia as a kid doing research trying to develop an involved understanding of what drove innovation in electronic music. This will put a future, "me" that much further along. Great work.
"Pump your loins children."
My god, I haven't thought about this site in probably 25 years. I was obsessed with it.
Wow, it's still growing. That's amazing!
I loved this site when I was a teenager. It's where like half of my taste in music came from
It still exists! I remember the Flash version back in the day.
It still worked a few years ago but no longer :( (http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/)
It still exists at https://archive.org/details/music_202007 .
I've come accross this website a few times but only now clicked on the hamburger menu and then on "how to use" to learn that learned that you had to zoom in and click on a "button" (some kind of polygon approximating a circle?) to listen to the music. I think I tried clicking on the titles before and concluded that it didn't work.
"Psydub is what the crusty hippies listen to when they get tired of dancing. Or when the drugs wear off. Or when they choose horse tranquilizers instead of LSD."
Hey... H E Y!
Man I went straight for psydub info. Back about 5 years ago I stumbled onto so some really interesting “psydub” playlists on Spotify with very strange song names and I thought I’d really found something good. Then poof! they disappeared one day and nothing labeled “psydub” seems to hit the mark and I don’t know what the hell that stuff was that disappeared.
> The late 70s binged on Disco like Charlie Sheen with an 8-ball of coke. Just about every legendary rock band released a Disco record or at least toyed with its aesthetics at one time or another: Kiss, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Queen, Neil Young, Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney. It was everywhere, it was popular, and you couldn't find a single radio station that wasn't playing it.
> All this animosity culminated in the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Chicago's Comisky Park in July, 1979 -- a radio promotion held between the games of a baseball double header that caused so much damage the second game was forfeit.
LMAO and TIL
This looks like it must have taken FOREVER to compile - deep appreciations for Ishkur for putting this together. I'm a huge chiptune fan so was happy to hear Rob Hubbard [1] come up on there as well.
[1] https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/H/Hubbard_Rob
I was initially a little miffed to not see Garage House and then I noticed that they have it as a separate branch from "traditional" house and you know what, I'm okay with that. It's more correct as Garage House really derives from the music played at places like Paradise Garage and The Loft, which pre-dates traditional Chicago house.
And then there's Ron Hardy at Chicago's Warehouse who played both.
this is one of my all time fave internet properties. it never gets old... and somehow it's still being updated?? new version looks nice, but i do miss that late 90s aesthetic from before...
This was one of the first sites I ever used online. Shame we can't see the Flash version.
Amazing timeline visualization of the evolution of genres
This is awesome, thanks Ishkur.
It's a list/timeline of electronic genres and subgenres with samples and descriptions (informative + humor). The UI is also great.
Interesting website. I thought for sure I'd find mention of Silver Apples of the Moon. May have missed it though...
This is wild. Just a couple weeks ago I was describing this site to someone and assumed it was lost to time. Amazing it is still around. Thanks for sharing!
Whats a good place these days to download/find niche music like this days? I loved what.cd before it shut down
Electronic music is anything but niche
anyways, rutracker or many of the other private trackers
If you want to discover electronic subgenres then I'd recommend to listen the weekly Essential Mix https://www.mixesdb.com/w/Category:Essential_Mix
If you want some personal recommendation my current top 5 (changes all the time)
Daft Punk (1997) https://www.mixesdb.com/w/1997-03-02_-_Daft_Punk_-_Essential...
Justice (2007) https://www.mixesdb.com/w/2007-06-10_-_Justice_-_Essential_M...
Sharam (2009) https://www.mixesdb.com/w/2009-08-29_-_Sharam_-_Essential_Mi...
Skrillex (2013) https://www.mixesdb.com/w/2013-06-15_-_Skrillex_-_Essential_...
Ben Böhmer (2021) https://www.mixesdb.com/w/2021-10-09_-_Ben_B%C3%B6hmer_-_Ess...
Essential Mix opened my early 2000s teenage world to so much more electronic music. Good memories of downloading sets via Napster and manually recording on to cassettes to listen to in my '95 Saturn. What a weird statement.
https://www.youtube.com/@HDMixtapesChannel
for old electronic music - Youtube, honestly. the algorithm is pretty good for finding old electronic music. like if youtube recommends me some random old 7 minute song with nothing but a picture of a record, there's a good chance I'm gonna like it at this point.
I'm on some of the oink/what successors and honestly, it's so hard to build ratio that it makes me not really like them at all.
> I'm on some of the oink/what successors and honestly, it's so hard to build ratio that it makes me not really like them at all.
You might have some success remaking rips others have made using the same settings for the rips and encodes, and then letting your torrent client recheck the existing torrent against your version of the files. I’ve also had success contacting filesharing-friendly artists and getting new and unreleased albums and tracks and building ratio more directly that way.
Rutracker has been mostly good for my tastes.
mark the timeline by instrument release date, these evolution lines are nonsense. The TR808, TR909, SP1200, and MPC2000 release dates had more to do with the changes in sound of these genres.
edit: it's a nice website though.
That argument is tantamount to saying that the EDM genre has stagnated since the 90s after your above listed musical instruments were released.
Many people would say it has.
Half of top ten Techno Beatport tracks, site where EDM djs buy music, sounds like Phuture - Acid Tracks from 1987.
It was made with a 303 and a 808, maybe a 606?
Sub genres always stagnate, if it changes to much it becomes a new sub genre
Yeah I would find this more interesting than the current tags e.g. IDM which is such a nonsense/confusing term anyway.
Not sure if Musique Concrete on one side or Venetian Snares on the other used those instruments.
Like every single other electronic musician Venteian Snares has used the 303, 606, 808 and 909 in their tracks.
Original, clones, emulations, or samples, that does not matter.
Weirdly, this website is one of the example references in the Typst documentation.
cool information, abysmal user interface ...
Reading this at 10 was like when Neo gets the kungfu program loaded into his brain. Completely mind blowing. The wildest music I had heard was Mandy Moore on the radio. And now there is a whole new horizon, with acid and 808s and sampling and breakbeats. It’s hard to imagine what I’d be listening to now without Iskur.
It's a nice website, but when I click on any music genre label, my Firefox asks: "Allow music.ishkur.com to use your HTML5 image data? This may be used to uniquely identify your computer."
...but why?
AFAIK that warning is "scripts on this page will capture image data from the window viewport, which in turn can be used to fingerprint you because of how rendering works"
Some people will care about this.