Every track since 1994

I've made music as theverychap since 1994. It started on an Amiga A1200 with OctaMED, and the earliest stuff is likely what you'd expect from that: breakbeats, samples galore, and jungle and techno tunes. The bulk of it comes from 1996 to 2001, when I was making music pretty much all day and night. There's a bit of a gap after 2008, and since 2021 I've been at it again (during that period we all went through).

There are over 150 tracks on 20-odd (rough) collections, and for years they sat on my old site as a list. Lists are fine if you already know what you're after, but nobody does with someone else's "back catalogue".

Six ways in

So... I rebuilt theverychap.com around different ways of exploring the same music. The Sonic Atlas places every track by how it sounds, tempo against brightness, energy, or dynamics, and if you turn on Drift, the player follows the closest-sounding track you haven't heard yet. The Timeline lays everything out in the order it was made, each strip drawn from the track's own waveform. The Tuner is an FM dial where every track is a station, always on air. The Mood mixer gives you faders for tempo, brightness, energy, and era, and plays the closest match. The Crate lets you flip through records, each one previewing its most energetic stretch. And the Gallery is there for anyone who just wants a tracklist.

All of that depends on knowing how each track sounds, so every one was analysed for tempo, energy, brightness, and dynamics. Tempo came from Essentia, and where it wasn't confident I checked by ear. The site runs on Laravel, React, and Inertia, with a Filament admin for the releases and tracks.

The descriptions came across from the old site as I wrote them at the time. "A pretty rubbish remix of a Justin Robertson tune done for the sake of it one night" survived the move, and so did "socks on tape", a release of tunes originally recorded to tape (like most!). I'll be tagging and labelling them further. It's nice for me to be able to explore what I made back in the day, and hopefully for anyone that's interested also... Maybe it's not the music that excites - maybe it's the beautiful UIs!

If you've got an archive and structured data of anything, I'd say give it more than one way of being explored. Someone who'd never scroll a tracklist might well turn a radio dial!