The room › Artists › Sam Wilkes

Where to start with Sam Wilkes

Start with The 3rd — One Theme & Subsequent Improvisation, 2021. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 37 Sam Wilkes 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 37 Sam Wilkes 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 37 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.

Every dated track here falls between 2018 and 2024, so this room holds one stretch of the discography and not the whole of it.

The mood knob swings 62 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

The 3rd — One Theme & Subsequent Improvisation, 2021. Of the 37 Sam Wilkes 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 melancholy end

Girl — iiyo iiyo iiyo, 2024. The lowest mood reading of any Sam Wilkes track in the room (6 out of 100). This is as far towards melancholy as the collection goes.

If you want the euphoric end

Hug — WILKES, 2018. The highest mood reading here, at 68 out of 100 — a 62-point swing across the collection towards euphoric.

Where Sam Wilkes 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 Sam Wilkes'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 Sam Wilkes track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

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

• Where to start with Pat Metheny — jazz, 17 tracks
• Where to start with Nina Simone — jazz, 18 tracks
• Where to start with Thelonious Monk — jazz, 30 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Sam Wilkes as a solo artist and from Los Angeles, the United States. Its contributors tag the artist jazz. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Sam Wilkes tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 37, across 7 albums. 36 of them carry a date, running from 2018 to 2024. 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 37 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 37 of these 37 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.