The room › Artists › Saul Williams

Where to start with Saul Williams

Start with Black History Month — The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, 2007. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 20 Saul Williams 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 20 Saul Williams 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 20 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: 20 tracks drawn from only 1 record.

The years need a caveat: every dated track comes from one record, so these years describe what is in the room, not a career. 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 hip hop; nothing here crosses into another genre.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Black History Month — The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, 2007. Of the 20 Saul Williams 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.

Only one entry point is offered for Saul Williams. The knob readings across these tracks sit too close together to mark out honest opposite ends, and inventing two would be worse than admitting it.

Where Saul Williams 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 Saul Williams'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 Saul Williams track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

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

• Where to start with Madvillain — hip hop, 23 tracks
• Where to start with The Notorious B.I.G. — hip hop, 17 tracks
• Where to start with Dr. Dre — hip hop, 24 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Saul Williams as a solo artist, from Newburgh, the United States and born in 1972. Its contributors tag the artist alternative hip hop, spoken word, poetry and hip-hop. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Saul Williams tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 20, across 1 album. 20 of them carry a date, running from 2007 to 2007. 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 20 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 20 of these 20 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.