Stations and dossiers

Some stars belong together for a reason the similarity graph does not know: they released on the same label, or they come from the same place. Those are the sky’s stations, and each opens into a dossier — a page over the sky that answers the same three questions for any station, and then points onwards.

What a dossier shows

• Where on the sky. A small map of the whole sky with every member of the station marked on it. This is the dossier’s argument rather than an illustration: a label’s roster or a city’s people either gather in one part of the sky or scatter across it, and which one it is says whether the station is a sound. Mark them on the sky closes the dossier, rings every member in gold on the big map, and frames them — leaving out the few far from the rest, so the cluster fills the screen. A small panel names the station while the rings are up, leads back to its dossier, and takes the rings away.
• When. Year by year: for a label, its output — every official release, not only those by artists the canon holds, because this is the label’s history; for a place, the year its acts began.
• Who. The roster, each member with the years they span drawn on the same axis as the chart above it, so a bar lies under the history it is part of. A label’s roster is ranked by releases on the label; a place has no weight of its own, so its people are ranked by how bright they are on the sky.
• Its sound, as the roster’s main styles — the same “main” the names on the sky and the radio use.
• Where next. A label points to its owner, its imprints and the places its roster comes from; a place points to the labels its people released on.

A name in a dossier opens its star: the dossier closes and the sky flies there.

Labels

A label is a Discogs label. Its roster is every artist on the sky with an official release on it, from the Discogs releases file: bootlegs name labels that never agreed to them and are not counted, nor is “Not On Label”, which is Discogs saying there was none. Pressings count — a label that issued an album in twelve countries did issue it twelve times.

The description is Discogs’s own. Where it names an artist the canon links to that Discogs entry, the name opens the star; where it names another label that has a dossier here, the name opens that.

A card lists the labels its artist released on, most releases first, with the years of the first and last release on each. Each opens the label’s dossier.

Scenes

A scene is a place of origin, as Wikidata records it: where a group formed, where a person was born. These are different claims — the band that formed in Manchester made its music there; a singer born there may have made theirs elsewhere — so a dossier counts them apart, and each member says which.

On a card, “formed in Manchester” opens Manchester.

Places are as fine as Wikidata’s: Brooklyn is its own scene beside New York City, and Madchester is Manchester.

Finding a station

The search box finds labels and places as well as stars, each under its own heading — “Motown” the label and “Motown Sound” the act are different answers. The kind holding the exact name typed comes first: “Detroit” leads with the place, “Motown” with the label.

Addresses

A dossier has an address of its own, and it opens over the sky:

Address	Opens
/label/1	The label with Discogs id 1
/scene/Q18125	The place that is Wikidata item Q18125

The camera’s fragment still works after it — /label/1#-12.4,88.1,6 — because the sky is behind the page.