Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

I thought I'd point out a wonderful resource called Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. According to wikipedia the guide is:

"An online Flash-driven guide to electronic music created by Kenneth John Taylor of British Columbia... The guide uses a graph style layout to roughly depict the chronological order of genres' appearance and contains 7 separate but interlinked pages for various areas of electronic music (house, techno, breakbeat, jungle, hardcore, downtempo and trance). Each genre has its own node on the graph which, when selected, brings up an information box containing a description (often highly editorial) by Taylor and a varying number of low-quality example samples."

It's a fun thing to poke around in and see how different genres of music are related and it's great how it provides samples for each genre so you get to actually hear the differences. It's highly editorial, often times Ishkur pokes fun at the genre (or sub-genre) in question. A good example is this snippet taken from the "Industrial Rock" category:

"Ah yes, Industrial Rock. The form of industrial that has had the most commercial success and it's all Trent Reznor's fault. Just how it's all Morrissey's fault there's emo."

I mean, this guide has it all. Do you know the difference between Buttrock Goa trance and Psytekk trance? Now you do! I even discovered that a line from the Sisters of Mercy song Detonation Boulevard is actually from a Chuck Berry song! Now if only this could be expanded to include every genre in the All Music Guide Little Earl would be in heaven. Bonus points to whoever can find where VNV Nation is hidden.

4 comments:

Little Earl said...

I found Pink Floyd.

Unknown said...

VNV Nation is Futurepop AKA Futuresynth, Industrial Synthpop.

Herr Zrbo said...

Pink Floyd is in the same category as the Beatles, hmm. I could toy with this thing all day.

Herr Zrbo said...

Wait a sec, check out "Speed Garage", it's gotta be the funniest description:

"Speed Garage: AKA the worst music in the world" and the first line is "Those dulled basslines sound like someone farting into a pillow" and it goes on from there.