Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
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Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (often referred to as just Ishkur's Guide) is an online Flash-driven guide to electronic music created by Kenneth John Taylor of British Columbia. The guide is currently hosted by the Digitally Imported Internet radio site.
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[edit] Description
The guide uses a graph style layout to roughly depict the chronological order of genres' appearance and contains 7 separate but interlinked pages for various areas of electronic music (house, trance, techno, breakbeat, jungle, hardcore and downtempo). Each genre has its own node on the graph which, when selected, brings up an information box containing a description (often highly editorial) by Taylor and a varying number of low-quality example samples, and is linked to related genres on the same area page with a select number of genre nodes linking the user to another related area page.
[edit] History
Taylor's inspiration for the guide was a challenge from a friend, and the first edition was created in "about two weeks" and on his website by the end of October, 2000. An abridged version was in the top 20 on Newgrounds briefly. The guide has gone through several revisions and was later hosted by Digitally Imported because of bandwidth expenses on Taylor's website. It is currently at version 2.5 which was released in January 2005 and lists 180 genres and includes 112.0Mb or 5 hours, 5 minutes and 7 seconds worth of samples. Taylor is currently working on version 3.0.
In September 2005, Ishkur's Guide was listed as an example of "Hierarchical Organization and Description of Music Collections at the Artist Level" in the published report of the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ECDL 2005, held in Vienna, Austria.[1]
In October 2010, Taylor posted on his website that version 3.0 is still under work after a long period of time without any updates.[2]
[edit] Accuracy
The disclaimer for the guide openly admits that the guide is "a non-technical, irreverent critique of electronic dance music. Its purpose is to entertain before it informs." and that "several biases here are celebrated lavishly".
Taylor has also stated "My Music Guide isn't done. It will never be done. It's what you call a 'work in progress'. I continually update it, revise it, change it, add different samples, newer samples, new genres, new definitions and snarling little comments to it as time goes on. There is no definitive version of it at all."
The guide is also prone to include misinformation. Taylor himself has addressed these inaccuracies with "I'll change it when I god damn feel like changing it". The guide also seems to be heavily influenced by Taylor's own taste and understanding of the genres. Indeed, in the past, there have even been featured genre examples of what were actually Internet hoax mp3 downloads, such as "Conquest of the Irrational" by Esthero (actually a Prunes remix of a song by DJ Vadim that has nothing to do with Esthero), underlining the inaccuracy of the non-peer-reviewed project. The section identifying sampling is also heavily criticized for its bevy of inaccuracies, but these are as much the fault of the users submitting the wrong information as it is the site's lone editor.
[edit] See also
- Electronic music
- Electronic dance music
- List of electronic music genres
- Genealogy of musical genres
- Music genre
- Music history
