Where to start with…

One track to begin with, for each artist the room knows well enough to answer for. Picked by a stated rule, not by taste, and printed on every page so you can disagree with it.

Zubissou Sounds is a listening room of 14,971 tracks by 5,585 artists, placed one at a time by hand over several years. These pages exist because “where do I start with this artist?” is a question the internet answers badly — usually with a ranked list assembled by someone who has not listened. Here the answer comes out of the collection itself: of the tracks actually in this room, which one sits closest to the centre of the rest.

There are 10 pages so far. They cover the artists this room holds most deeply. Of 5,585 artists in the catalogue, about three quarters are represented by a single track — nowhere near enough to answer a question like this honestly — so the list will grow slowly and stay short.

The pages

Where to start with Captain Beefheart
71 tracks · 4 albums · 1967–1980 · avant rock
Start with Autumn's Child — Safe As Milk, 1967
Where to start with S. Kiyotaka & Omega Tribe
58 tracks · 7 albums · 1983–2019 · city pop
Start with PADDLING TO YOU — AQUA CITY, 1983
Where to start with Aphex Twin
50 tracks · 5 albums · 1992–1996 · electronic
Start with #1 — Selected Ambient Works Volume II, 1994
Where to start with Wayne Shorter
36 tracks · 19 albums · 1969–1988 · bebop
Start with Capricorn — Super Nova, 1969
Where to start with Harold Budd
35 tracks · 6 albums · 1978–2013 · ambient
Start with A Stream With Bright Fish — The Pearl (with Brian Eno), 1984
Where to start with Miles Davis
34 tracks · 31 albums · 1957–2025 · jazz
Start with Circle in the Round — Circle in the Round, 1979
Where to start with R. D. Burman
33 tracks · 22 albums · 1966–2023 · bollywood
Start with Dance Music - Dushman Dost — Dushman Dost, 1981
Where to start with Hermeto Pascoal
31 tracks · 14 albums · 1977–2024 · jazz
Start with Surpresa — Brasil, Universo, 1986
Where to start with Ryuichi Sakamoto
24 tracks · 11 albums · 1987–2023 · japanese classical
Start with Aoneko no Torso
Where to start with Broadcast
19 tracks · 7 albums · 1997–2024 · dream pop
Start with Colour Me In [Demo] — Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000 - 2006, 2024

Nothing on these pages is ranked, and no record is called better than another. Every number is recomputed from the catalogue each time the pages are built.

The room itself

The pages above describe a collection; the room is how you play it — eight knobs instead of a feed, and no recommendation engine anywhere in it. It is in private beta, and the waitlist is on every page.