Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Ishkur's Guide V1 is classic internet lore. I'm looking forward to AI models that can describe, classify, and recommend music. Obviously there's Shazam and things like Cyanite (https://cyanite.ai/) but hopefully there will be some good open source models too shortly. You could imagine Ishkur's Guide V3 is constructed automatically by AI models, and places every track somewhere on the map, listing all the genres and influences, etc.

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.

Oh my gosh, I clicked expecting to see the classic old version... this is an updated one!! It looks like this one even shows the progression of the sound of a genre or subgenre over time, not just the other genres that came from it. Forgive my excitement but damn, the original guide was an absolute treasure of the early (at least for me) internet, and as a teenager getting into electronic music but with no real local scene or…

There's at least one track I wrote used as an example of a genre in this guide. Full disclosure: I have the privilege of knowing Ishkur personally