There’s a swarm of heavily populated Discord channels you can solicit recs in, but there’s also a slew of micro-spaces dedicated to certain scenes full of people posting goodness. You can even discover shards of unfinished songs by joining private channels, like the one for producer collective StudyGroup, which is regularly flooded with tantalizing drafts.
Congratulations: You’re officially an obsessive-compulsive obscurantist.
Level 5: Esotericel
If you’ve reached level five, turn back. Log off, tryhard. Everything from here will have titles you can’t type with your plebeian English keyboards, with music that defies all sense and logic. At parties, you talk about “SlimeTok” and “GifTok” and your daily news intake centers around the latest developments in this cursed underworld: SpinningTok, DiagnolTok, 3dTok, 67Tok, BlurTok.
Not really, but here are some of my strats for deep digging: reverse-engineering scenes by approaching them via oblique hashtags. Looksmaxxer keywords like “mewing,” “huntereyes,” “mogged” contain (unfortunately) a goldmine of jump- and hardstyle audios on TikTok. This is especially helpful for foreign languages—once you find a certain Cyrllic audio or hashtag, you can leapfrog off of it to unravel entire digital enclaves of Eastern European posters and musicians. This process eventually landed me in Telegram channels for artists like Dj trippie flameboy, Dayerteq, and voidvoice717, who have basically never been mentioned in Western media despite their sizable fanbases. I can’t understand a word but the concert clips are cool.
Other methods that border on stalking include: tunneling into the list of who an artist follows on Instagram; searching up a cool record on RYM that isn’t out yet, seeing who put the project on their “Anticipated Releases” list, and marking down everything else they’re excited about.
I’m also talking about hubs like Music Place, which I covered in my last column, and resources like the Yabujin Masterdoc, which catalogues every release by the mysterious Lithuanian artist. If you’ve made it here, you’re probably familiar with timeline characters like Peter Grimbeek, a SoundCloud obsessive who comments things like “Stutter going steady with bass hum, somewhere in the smog there is a real person (at least one) lost in the purple haze,” on fried rap frags by artists with 21 followers. Or bakuwara, a mysterious Japanese producer who seems to operate a ring of blistering dariacore accounts differentiated by numbers and first names.
Maybe the most underrated digging strategy is what I call “Professional Leaking Under the Guise of Gainful Employment,” or PLUGGË, which involves going to school to become an engineer/marketer/creative director and landing a job at a DSP like Spotify; once you’ve Trojan Goated yourself into the backend, you can listen freely to every artists’ unreleased uploads. We also can’t forget about deep-state file fracking, the process by which you can use Inspect Element to reveal every single media file on a webpage and right-click to download them.
