Looking for a New Band to Love?
Check out musicplasma.com. It’s a cultural mapping service, designed to help you find new music and movies. But the artistic genealogies, rendered in thin threads and colored orbs, are interesting to navigate in their own right. (Be sure to read the “help” file, as the navigation system is a little confusing at first.) I learned you can get from Belle and Sebastian to Oingo Boingo in five simple steps that involve Interpol, Warsaw, and Joy Division. And that you have to pass through Nick Drake to get from Radiohead to Elliott Smith.
I don’t know how they cook up these relationships and I don’t really want to, but they could make explosive fodder for passionate music nerds. Why, for example, must we pass through Sonny Rollins to get from Miles Davis to Art Blakey?
Also: Wiccan warfare in Florida!
that site is ok, but they'd really need more information on where the genealogy comes from. i still prefer gnod and its music mapping, since that information is culled from the public at large, so it's at least revealing real relationships, not some unexplained voodoo. here's the map for belle and sebastian for example - http://www.music-map.com/belle+-26+sebastian.html