So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.
The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.
So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.
The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.
I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.
I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.
Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.
HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.
Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?
This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.
> It still has those Flash vibes I think.
I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.
Historical comment only. I first listened to this music in the late 1970s. One big change in the story, over time, is how few people trace the sound to Hendrix now. (Not this map in particular. Metal fans I know would agree with the map.) I think (?) a common current viewpoint is that Led Zep [!?] was foundational but the genre really started with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.
Which, definitions change. But in 1977 I listened to Purple Haze and, sure, it was "Psychedelic Rock" as indicated on the map. 100%! But it was also almost definitionally metal. Forty-nine years ago, I mean, not today.
[!?] I love Zeppelin. But I would have been laughed out of high school if I'd compared them to metal, or claimed they were even hard rock.
For me I would always say that somewhere between 68-71 metal was being cooked up by Black Sabbath in Birmingham, Motörhead in London, Pentagram in Virginia, and Blue Cheer in San Francisco. Obviously Hendrix’s influence would be most obvious with the latter.
I've heard it as 'metalstep' but I'm sure there are other names for it. Very aggressive cross between metal and EDM. More of a metal sensibility than hardcore EDM; more of an EDM / trance sensibility than, say, Fear Factory. The drum tracks have more of a death metal vibe to them. It's probably easy to blend into other genres.
I'm thinking stuff like Invocation Array, Rave The Requivm, Follow the Cipher, even stuff like The Algorithm and Neurotech. I suppose Fear Factory would count here as well.
There used to be a thing like 20-ish years ago called Musicovery that could sort of do this if you clicked around.
Bands like Sleep, OM, Electric Wizard, Weedeater, Dopesmoker, Satans Satyrs, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Salems Pot, Acid Witch… there’s so so many.
Also heavier bands that are more stoner/psych than metal like All Them Witches, Mars Red Sky, Dead Meadow, Aunt Cynthia’s Cabin, all rip too.
- White Wizzard
- Tailgunner
- Skull Fist
- Wolf
- Enforcer
- 3 Inches of Blood
- Lucifer
- and many others
Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.
Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.
Just read the update:
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my 2023-12-04 layoff from Spotify I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution..
what a shame. I didn't realize the author worked for Spotify. Guess it makes sense. Spotify should've acquired it from the author or made a deal with him to keep it live since all the links lead to Spotify anyway.
https://toposonico.com/#lon=14.4313&lat=-1.0200&z=9.10&entit...
One of my favorite documentaries to learn the history of metal is "metal: a headbanger's journey" (available on YouTube).
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ward-shelley-history-of-scienc...
https://websites.umich.edu/~esrabkin/sf/HistoryOfSFVisualize...
I'm not entirely sure why those specific song choices for the Swedish Death category. The older At The Gates albums are more like the original Swedish sound but Slaughter of the Soul (included in Swedish Death) is essentially THE Melo-death album.
It might be fun to have a sort of gazetteer for the map so we can find bands.
Perhaps we need a word to disambiguate "atmosludge" from actual sludge, for the same reason "skramz" was invented.
I suppose you used ◌̈ (U+0308).