The room › Artists › Chuck Berry

Where to start with Chuck Berry

Start with Almost Grown — Berry Is on Top, 1959. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 14 Chuck Berry 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 14 Chuck Berry 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 14 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 collection leans hard on one record: 12 of the 14 tracks come from Berry Is on Top alone.

The years need a caveat: 12 of 14 dated tracks land in the 1950s and come from 1 record, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Almost Grown — Berry Is on Top, 1959. Of the 13 Chuck Berry tracks here that have actually been listened to, this one sits closest to the average of them across the four knobs the room runs on. The other 1 arrived carrying the default for their genre, and averaging a placeholder in would move the centre towards nothing. It is the least surprising thing among the tracks that were read, which is what an entry point should be.

If you want the ambient end

Memphis, Tennessee - Single Version — Gold, 2005. The lowest energy reading of any Chuck Berry track in the room (43 out of 100). This is as far towards ambient as the collection goes.

If you want the driving end

Hey Pedro — Berry Is on Top, 1959. The highest energy reading here, at 81 out of 100 — a 38-point swing across the collection towards driving.

Where Chuck Berry 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 Chuck Berry'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 Chuck Berry track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

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

• Where to start with Little Richard — rock and roll, 73 tracks
• Where to start with Hermeto Pascoal — jazz, 31 tracks
• Where to start with Yellow Magic Orchestra — japanese, 12 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Chuck Berry as a solo artist, from St. Louis, the United States and born in 1926. Its contributors tag the artist rock, jazz, blues, usa and rockabilly. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Chuck Berry tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 14, across 3 albums. 14 of them carry a date, running from 1959 to 2005. 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. 13 of these 14 tracks have been read that way. The other 1 arrived with the default for their genre and nobody has listened to them yet, so they are left out of the centre, the ends and the spread quoted above.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 14 of these 14 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.