The room › Artists › Captain Beefheart

Where to start with Captain Beefheart

Start with Safe As Milk - Take 5 — Safe As Milk, 1967. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 72 Captain Beefheart tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.

This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 72 Captain Beefheart tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 72 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.

The density knob swings 48 points across these tracks, the widest of the four — it is the axis this artist actually travels along in this room.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Safe As Milk - Take 5 — Safe As Milk, 1967. Of the 72 Captain Beefheart tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.

If you want the sparse end

Flavor Bud Living — Original Bat Chain Puller, 1980. The lowest density reading of any Captain Beefheart track in the room (40 out of 100). This is as far towards sparse as the collection goes.

If you want the wall end

Wild Life — Trout Mask Replica, 1969. The highest density reading here, at 88 out of 100 — a 48-point swing across the collection towards wall.

Where Captain Beefheart sits in the room

Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Captain Beefheart's average coordinates and the range they cover.

All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.

What is here, record by record

Every Captain Beefheart track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Captain Beefheart's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.

• Where to start with Charles Mingus — jazz, 28 tracks
• Where to start with Jimi Hendrix — psych rock, 44 tracks
• Where to start with The Rolling Stones — rock, 26 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Captain Beefheart as a solo artist, from Glendale, the United States and born in 1941. Its contributors tag the artist weird america, avant-blues and proto-punk. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Captain Beefheart tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 72, across 5 albums. 72 of them carry a date, running from 1967 to 1980. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.

Is this a best-of, or a ranking?

No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.

Where do the knob numbers come from?

They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. All 72 of these tracks have been read individually — nothing on this page is running on a default.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 72 of these 72 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.