The room › Artists › Portishead
Where to start with Portishead
Start with Over — Portishead, 1997. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 33 Portishead 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 33 Portishead 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 33 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.
It is deep rather than broad: 33 tracks drawn from only 3 records.
The years need a caveat: 22 of 33 dated tracks land in the 1990s and come from 2 records, 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.
Every track is filed under trip hop; nothing here crosses into another genre.
Three ways in
The one track, if you only play one
Over — Portishead, 1997. Of the 33 Portishead 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 ambient end
Roads — Dummy, 1994. The lowest energy reading of any Portishead track in the room (22 out of 100). This is as far towards ambient as the collection goes.
If you want the driving end
Silence — Third, 2008. The highest energy reading here, at 55 out of 100 — a 33-point swing across the collection towards driving.
Where Portishead 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 Portishead'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
| Album | Year | Tracks |
|---|---|---|
| Dummy | 1994 | 11 |
| Third | 2008 | 11 |
| Portishead | 1997 | 11 |
Every Portishead track in the room
| Track | Album | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Biscuit | Dummy | 1994 |
| Glory Box | Dummy | 1994 |
| It Could Be Sweet | Dummy | 1994 |
| It's A Fire | Dummy | 1994 |
| Mysterons | Dummy | 1994 |
| Numb | Dummy | 1994 |
| Pedestal | Dummy | 1994 |
| Roads | Dummy | 1994 |
| Sour Times | Dummy | 1994 |
| Strangers | Dummy | 1994 |
| Wandering Star | Dummy | 1994 |
| All Mine | Portishead | 1997 |
| Cowboys | Portishead | 1997 |
| Elysium | Portishead | 1997 |
| Half Day Closing | Portishead | 1997 |
| Humming | Portishead | 1997 |
| Mourning Air | Portishead | 1997 |
| Only You | Portishead | 1997 |
| Over | Portishead | 1997 |
| Seven Months | Portishead | 1997 |
| Undenied | Portishead | 1997 |
| Western Eyes | Portishead | 1997 |
| Deep Water | Third | 2008 |
| Hunter | Third | 2008 |
| Machine Gun | Third | 2008 |
| Magic Doors | Third | 2008 |
| Nylon Smile | Third | 2008 |
| Plastic | Third | 2008 |
| Silence | Third | 2008 |
| Small | Third | 2008 |
| The Rip | Third | 2008 |
| Threads | Third | 2008 |
| We Carry On | Third | 2008 |
Near neighbours in this room
These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Portishead's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.
- Where to start with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds — post-punk, 41 tracks
- Where to start with Corbin — cloud rap, 10 tracks
- Where to start with James Blake — east coast hip hop, 17 tracks
What the open databases say
MusicBrainz lists Portishead as a group, from Bristol, the United Kingdom and formed in 1991. Its contributors tag the artist trip-hop, down-tempo, rock, electronic and downtempo. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.
Questions
How many Portishead tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?
There are 33, across 3 albums. 33 of them carry a date, running from 1994 to 2008. 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 33 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 33 of these 33 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.