Genre: A 33 1/3 Series

Bloomsbury presents Trip-Hop by RJ Wheaton, read by Adam Sims. Trip-hop described some of the 1990s’ best music, and it was one of the decade’s most revealing bad ideas. This book chronicles the music and its leading artists, packed with recommended listening, essential tracks, great remixes...

Bloomsbury presents Dance-Punk by Larissa Wodtke, read by Megan Gage. Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as disco-punk and funk-punk, it skirts, overlaps, and blurs into other genres including post-punk...

Bloomsbury presents Krautrock by Marshall Gu, read by Adam Sims. Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history. In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting...

Bloomsbury presents '70s Teen Pop by Lucretia Tye Jasmine, read by Megan Gage. Teen pop is a sub-genre of popular music marketed to tweens and teens. Its melodic yearning and veneer of sincerity appeal to an emerging romantic eroticism and autonomy. But tweens and teens buy music that isn’t...

Bloomsbury presents Math Rock by Jeff Gomez, read by Hunter Johns. Math rock sounds like blueprints look: exact, precise, architectural. This trance-like progressive metal music with indie rock and jazz influences has been captivating and challenging listeners for decades. Bands associated with...

Bloomsbury presents Soul-Folk by Ashawnta Jackson, read by Megan Gage. Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim...

Bloomsbury presents Shoegaze by Ryan Pinkard, read by Hunter Johns. What the hell is shoegaze? A scene? A movement? A sound? Back in the Nineties, many would have said the so-called genre was entirely fabricated. The term itself, an offensive piss-take given by the notoriously catty and...

Bloomsbury presents South African Popular Music by Lior Phillips, read by Megan Gage. From the storied ache of mbube harmonies of the ‘40s to the electronic boom of kwaito and the amapiano and house explosion of the ‘00s, this book explores vignettes taken from across South Africa’s...

Bloomsbury presents Death Metal by T Coles, read by Rob Crossan. Featuring exclusive interviews with key figures, from Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway to guitarist Bill Steer of Gentlemans Pistols, Carcass, and Napalm Death, this is your guide through the history of death metal. Guitars...

Bloomsbury presents Neue Deutsche Welle by Claudia Lonkin, read by Megan Gage. Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), or “German New Wave,” was made extraordinarily popular in the 1970s and 1980s by the likes of Nena's "99 Luftballons" and Trio's "Da Da Da"—and then left as quickly as it came...

Bloomsbury presents 20th Century Ambient by Dusty Henry, read by Sam Rushton. Through text and comics, 20th Century Ambient searches through ambient music’s recent history to unearth how the genre has evolved and the role it plays in our daily lives. Ambient music is a part of our daily lives...

Bloomsbury presents Plunderphonics by Matthew Blackwell, read by Sam Rushton. Featuring interviews with John Oswald, Negativland, and others and drawing on a wealth of research on copyright and intellectual property, Plunderphonics explores the impact of a genre that made illegality a point of...

The scene that bulldozed the path from prog and glam to punk and new wave, pub rock was a short-lived phenomenon in the U.K., emerging amidst the bloated landscape of prog rock and an increasingly oppressive economic outlook. In the U.K. in the early ‘70s, in response to the glitz of glam and...

Minimalist Music looks critically into the music’s past, shows how the genre thrives across styles, and points the way toward minimalism’s ongoing future. Minimalism as a genre is best defined not by any style or flavor but by its means. Certain rhythms and chords in other music may identify...

Latin American alternative rock found its identity in the combination of popular music genres like cumbia and son, traditional folk, ska, hip hop, and punk. The artists leading those fusions formed the Alterlatino movement, a coalition involving musicians from across the continent who had...

When musique concrète first hit the airwaves, listeners reached for their earplugs. This strange genre didn’t sound like music at all! It ignored melody and meter. It didn’t even use instruments. Instead, musique concrète took recorded sound as its raw material. That could be anything from...

Pushing the limits of static, hiss, and high-pitched whines, noise music seeks to find expression just beyond the boundaries of general listener comfort and demonstrate how anyone can learn to love noise. But it’s frequently one of the most misunderstood genres of music, often dismissed by...