Music Place is a space for those tired of your run-of-the-mill, approved playlists and sterile recommendation feeds.
It’s a cracked-out corner of the internet that’s preserving the weirder side of underground audio history, and there really is some weird stuff out there.
Recently profiled by Pitchfork, the mysterious archivist behind Music Place has uploaded close to 7,000 forgotten tracks that include everything from lo-fi Vietnamese trance to psych-noise oddities from obscure Russian forums, with obscure visuals to match. It’s a library for the ludicrous.
It is less of a YouTube channel and more of a digital hallucination. The videos are glitchy, the thumbnails are chaotic and the music is often warped until it’s hardly recognisable.
But there is gold amongst the static: forgotten tracks by artists who never had a real audience, field recordings from who knows where and genre tags that barely make sense along the lines of ‘wetcore’ (?) and ‘dariacore’ (?) … beats me.
What makes this compelling isn’t just the volume – it’s the ethos. Music Place operates like a one-person museum of lost sonic artefacts, challenging the platform’s obsession with metrics and virality.
The channel’s homepage presents as a glitch hack pop-up page, a slightly unsettling experience that is not tailored whatsoever, and is entirely the point.
There are whispers that the creator might evolve the channel into a VTuber-style digital persona, hosting experimental mixes and livestreams as a kind of anti-algorithm DJ.
If that happens, we’re looking at one of the most anarchic but sincere contributions to digital music culture this year.
In a world where everything is polished, monetised, and fed to you by the algorithm, Music Place is a beautiful mess, chaotic, glitchy and worth getting lost in, especially if you’re into a ‘highly abrasive, often baffling’ type beat, as Pitchfork put it.
Words by Georgie Tancred.
