Artist & curator
The Waxonia Desk
The Waxonia Desk curates a list on Waxonia. Hand-picked records, each with a reason.
- Curates
- 303 picks across 31 selections
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Their picks — selected, not ranked
6 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Chicago House
Six records from the Chicago rooms themselves rather than from the documentary about them. Two of them are not house at all, which is the point: what a room plays and what a genre is later said to be are different lists.
Opens withMr. Fingers — Can You Feel It
3 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Chicago House
Three Chicago records built on a single idea held far past comfort — a loop, a filter sweep, a piano figure. The architecture French house took wholesale a decade later was already finished here.
Opens withMr. Fingers — Can You Feel It
3 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Chicago House
Three records made of almost nothing — a drum machine, a bass generator used wrong, a loop held until it becomes a song. The cheapest equipment in the shop, and a genre came out of it.
Opens withSteve "Silk" Hurley — Jack Your Body
4 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Detroit Techno
Four Detroit records whose second life was European. Ghent, Berlin and Rotterdam heard them before most of America did, and a continental floor is audible in what happened to the music afterwards.
Opens withRhythim Is Rhythim — Strings of Life
4 picks · updated 2026-08-28
Detroit Techno
Where to go once Strings of Life has done its work. Four records that show the city arguing with itself about what the future was supposed to sound like.
Opens withModel 500 — No UFO's
5 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Disco
Five records whose lives were decided in a booth rather than on radio — a closing ritual, a flop rescued by a mix, the first commercial twelve-inch, and a record a London sound system took its name from.
Opens withChic — Good Times
5 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Dubstep
Five records from the January 2006 broadcast usually credited with taking dubstep national, and from the months either side of it. A few hundred people in a Brixton basement were given two hours of national radio.
Opens withDigital Mystikz — Anti-War Dub
4 picks · updated 2026-08-29
French House
Four records for anyone who thinks the French touch was one trick. It was, and the trick was good enough to survive being done four completely different ways.
Opens withStardust — Music Sounds Better with You
5 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Funk
Five records where rhythm stopped being the setting for a song and became the song. Every rhythm guitarist and every sampler of the last fifty years has been living off this tradition.
Opens withJames Brown — Cold Sweat
6 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Gqom
Six records tracing how a Durban sound left the city — the first one on national radio, the one that reached London before it was accepted at home, and the one that turned its rhythms into outright pop.
Opens withBabes Wodumo featuring Mampintsha — Wololo
5 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Juke and Footwork
Five records tracing how Chicago's footwork reached a listening audience that had never seen the dancing — mostly through a British label that spent a decade putting it in front of everybody else.
Opens withDJ Nate — Hatas Our Motivation
4 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Krautrock
Four records for the reader who arrived here from a techno page and wants to know what a German band from 1972 has to do with anything.
Opens withKraftwerk — Autobahn
5 picks · updated 2026-08-29
Neo-Soul
Five records from the two years around Voodoo, when a group of musicians in one New York studio argued a genre into existence — plus the sampled bar that the drumming on all of them is answering.
Opens withD'Angelo — Untitled (How Does It Feel)
6 picks · updated 2026-08-29
UK Garage
Six records most people met in the middle of a mix rather than as singles. The canon this genre left behind was assembled on pirate radio and compilation CDs, and it is not quite the list the charts would give you.
Opens withMJ Cole — Sincere
11 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Eleven records, eleven of our rankings, thirty years. Every one of them gets a room moving while telling it something it would rather not hear, and most of the rooms never noticed.
Opens withGilberto Gil — Domingo no Parque
11 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Eleven records, three of our rankings, thirty years. One drum machine tuned in a Florida car park, and what became of it in Rio and on the South Side of Chicago.
Opens withMC A.D.E. — Bass Rock Express
12 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Twelve records, ten of our rankings, one year. Jungle, trip-hop, Memphis, kwaito, dub techno and Britpop all arriving at once, none of them aware of the others.
Opens withGoldie — Inner City Life
11 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Eleven records, six countries, one year. Lagos, Kingston, Casablanca, Lusaka, Istanbul and Accra all having a better 1976 than anywhere with a music press.
Opens withFela Kuti & Africa 70 — Zombie
12 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Twelve records, eleven of our rankings and thirty-eight years apart, all doing one thing: turning to a single person and saying it out loud.
Opens withHank Williams — I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
6 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Six records that all live at or near 160 BPM, from Chicago and from every British rave that got there first. Four of our rankings share a tempo, which is the whole claim a 160 set makes in practice.
Opens withOrigin Unknown — Valley of the Shadows
10 picks · updated 2026-08-28
A general selection
Ten records that open ten doors. One way into each genre we cover, plus two that show what the deep end sounds like once you are through.
Opens withRhythim Is Rhythim — Strings of Life
5 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
One line, five records, forty years: Kingston to Croydon by way of every British rave that treated the sub-bass as the point rather than the foundation.
Opens withThe Revolutionaries — Kunta Kinte Dub
6 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Six records split evenly between two rooms that were not supposed to talk to each other. Half guitars, half machines, and the point is that the division was always administrative rather than musical.
Opens withNew Order — Blue Monday
6 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Six records tracing one continuous line from a Kingston mixing desk to a Chicago dance floor. The claim is that dub never stopped: it changed tempo, crossed an ocean, and kept going under other names.
Opens withAugustus Pablo — King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
6 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Six records from Detroit, Lagos and Accra, offered as one subject rather than three genres. The distance between them is geographic and almost nothing else.
Opens withMarvin Gaye — What's Going On
5 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Five records from before the map starts. Everything else we publish is downstream of one of these, and most of it is downstream of several.
Opens withJames Brown — Cold Sweat
3 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Three records that pass for pop singles until you notice that nothing inside them behaves like one. A sampled interview, a vocal that will not resolve, and a techno record with a tune it never apologised for.
Opens withInner City — Good Life
100 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Every genre we rank, distilled to a hundred records and ordered best first. If you only ever play one list from this site, play this one.
Opens withRhythim Is Rhythim — Strings of Life
13 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Thirteen records, ten of our rankings, ten years. The decade cheap machines and cheap pressings reached people with no access to a record industry, told through the labels they had to start instead.
Opens withJoy Division — Love Will Tear Us Apart
9 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
Three artists, nine of our rankings. Everyone the corpus ranks in three different genres, and the records that got them in.
Opens withHerbie Hancock — Maiden Voyage
12 picks · updated 2026-08-29
A general selection
One label, five of our rankings, thirteen years. A shop in Sheffield that kept signing the thing that came next, and kept being right about it.
Opens withForgemasters — Track With No Name
About the curator
The people who write the rankings on this site. We keep the lists honest, we argue about the order, and we get asked the same question more than any other: where should someone actually start. These are our answers.