As a young person, I stumbled on some of my favorite music through reposters: YouTube hobbyists who archive songs, sometimes pairing them with visuals that enhance the music. There’s always been a cottage industry of these channels, from corporate EDM lords like Trap Nation and the babes-and-beats slop of Majestic Casual to rap cataloguers like Astari, Araiguma, and karma archives. They exist for every genre, every format, every decade: longtime junglists uploading rare pirate radio streams; twee pop addicts sharing attic scraps. In the last few years, there’s been a boom of “internet music” foragers like label Dismiss Yourself, which helped kickstart the hexD scene, and Madjestic Kasual, a tasteful parody of the original.
Maybe the most cracked and fried of them all—here I go again describing ways to prepare an egg—is Music Place, a mysterious entity constantly reposting the most deranged oddities. The music shared on their SoundCloud and YouTube, which has a small cult following and millions of views, flashes across genres and languages with no sense of order. In one click, there’s the earthy piano compositions of Russian SoundCloud composer n-ый мистер; the next, Labubu-themed dariacore music, courtesy of a covert ring of no-name accounts like “loyalty,” “hope,” and “love” whose cumulative plays total under 1,000. There’s the eerily enchanting “gnom.mp3” by the Yabujin alt Λąųmę§ğęƴđžįąɲţ; hikaru purpose’s underwater dreamworld flip of K-pop girl group FIFTY FIFTY’s “Barbie Dreams”; Vietnamese DJ TÂN THIẾU GIA’s trance freakout “ദ്ദി bimbimbimbimbimbimbimദ്ദി.” Hitting play is like opening a musical blind box. Among the most popular uploads is a Runescape-esque remix of Soulja Boy’s “Sidekick” called “Mr Cheddar says: Cheese Louise!!” by the group FLARP GANG.
The account’s creator initially told me they were a zoomer from Utashinai, Japan’s smallest city, a place so tiny that it tried to boost tourism by cosplaying as a Swiss alpine town and whose only high school shut down in 2007 amid decreasing population. But the creator quickly gave up the act and revealed a conceptual bent to the channel. They proffered a real identity, including a past life working on another popular reposting channel, but swore me to secrecy. The dream is to eventually turn Music Place into a VTuber operation: “Hatsune Miku but for music finding.”
Music Place launched a few years ago with the goal of spiritually linking disparate semi-scenes and hip-hop microspaces, a “breadcrumb trail of certain sorts of underground music,” a way to “promote what I consider the cutting edge of underground music and things on the fringes of genres,” the owner says. “Mixing highbrow ambient with lowbrow dariacore is the point—it’s just as good as each other. The sweet spot is the middleground of connecting them.”
While even the creator can’t fully explain it, Music Place conjures a certain mystical energy. To qualify for a repost, a song must be obscure. “If something has between 0 and 5 reposts and it fits the vibe of Music Place, then I repost it instantly,” the owner tells me. It also needs to have distinct visual art. The song covers bolt between banal and nightmarish, from zoomed-in, weirdly stretched images of cartoons and the Uno video game to gory combat zones of amputated limbs and cursed monsters. Even if the music is good, they won’t share it if it has a “boring, business-like presentation” that doesn’t fit the Music Place aesthetic. “An example of a very good resposter who reposts lots of this music that I consider has boring artwork is [blogger and Pitchfork contributor] billdifferen,” they say. “Very very good reposter… but it’s not right for what I do. We operate different.”
So, yeah—this is a highly abrasive, often baffling Place populated by musical chickenscratch, sure to draw the ire of critics who’ll call everything shite, insular, pretentious. Some of it is certainly unlistenable, but the gems outweigh the drivel.
The owner describes the channel’s credo as something like “the universe experiencing itself,” a kind of autonomous self-capturing system for the endless musical output on the web. “I’ve had creators say on uploads 'I forgot I even made this,’” they recall. With over 6,900 videos on the YouTube channel, almost more uploads than subscribers, this is more like a hoarding situation worthy of a TLC show. Even the creator forgets about things they’ve posted. “I am there to experience this music and make it last so others can,” they muse. This is part of why they want to keep their ID unknown, so nobody projects any biases onto the channel. “I don’t want to be bound by any like, ‘Oh they’re this.’ Like Chief Keef said, I’m 300.” The creator is most proud of archiving music that the artists eventually deleted, so the Music Place upload remains maybe the only copy in the world. At one point, they shoot a link to something they call “peak Music Place.” It’s a 66-second dustbowl of kicks, called “££êå﴾r̤̈﴿ᘻ¢ᖇ¥ R﴾r̤̈﴿µ§ñêᖇ﴾k̤̈﴿ 𝟿99̲̅6” by the artist Ꞥҽ̤ʍ̤Ⱥ̤ժ̤ل̤ꖦᲯ̤է̤Ⱥ̤𝔏ʍ̤ą̤ժ̤ҽ̤Ꝉ̤Ⱥ. Neither the song nor the artist exists online anymore.
The creator started digging as a teen, when a best friend from school would bring in Throbbing Gristle CDs, which inspired them to hunt for obscure sonic shards to offer in return. That turned into collecting dubs, rare rips of vinyl, and DAT extractions: “I always wanted to be able to show something to someone they might not know, regardless how expert level a digger they might already be.” Online, they got hooked on key blogs and databases like WMFU and Mutant Sounds, which would catalog little-known releases, as well as video archives like Karagara and Surrealmoviez. “If there’s a private torrent site for obscure media I’m a known member, usually called ‘IRAQ’ or ‘bukkakeprincess’ or something,” they say. “I don’t like being me online, it’s scary.” At this point, they estimate having over 11 terabytes of music saved, and around 23tb of media in total.
Cratedigging has been a thing for decades, but crate-clicking is its own beast. Some archive pages like 7x11x13 have coded their own plugins that help page owners excavate efficiently, like a third-party SoundCloud tool that lets users sort by only singles and “deep cuts.” The Music Place owner’s method for mining on YouTube includes making a fresh Gmail account, then only clicking on things with little-to-no views, until the algorithm becomes deranged. They currently have 20 “hole” accounts for this purpose: “Do your normal watching on your main, dig on the hole accounts.” They told me another strategy but said I couldn’t print it because the powers-that-be would patch it.
They have some digger-inspirations, like Owl Qaeda, who used to run the channel Holy Warbles and whose discoveries they praise like holy text. The Music Place channel itself is set up like an elaborate homage, with links to venerated objects like the Nurse With Wound list, an index of obscure figures compiled by the experimental band. (They want this to be a modern version of that.) Secret playlists “go live when they’re ready,” as if they’re alien zygotes preparing to be birthed into the world. “I want there to be fun resources, I think a lot of the bigger things people use to find music maybe like Boiler Room or RA are not so good. I don't use them or much enjoy them,” they say. “I love stumbling on something that unravels ykno.”
The project’s clearly powered by a love—maybe “obsession” or “pathological fetishization” is more apt—for obscurities and the act of discovery, for microscenes over the mainstream. They rave about Black Kray, a rapper who “never sold out in any capacity, true to himself in every sense, influenced people effortlessly.” They’d rather listen to Yuno Miles’ caterwauling fast rap than Eminem. “It makes me ‘feel more.’ I don’t want a fkkin lesson in linguistic speed-talking skills. I feel more from a kid taking the piss having fun. It’s more real to me.” They want to “DESTROY” oldheads and when I ask for their current favorite artists, they list people like Gasuiji, whose name is written as “я ̶̠̣̲̖͆?̷̡̛̣͍̯͛͒̈؏ ̴3ui” on SoundCloud and whose work they characterize as “almost like the destruction of what music is, anti-music.” There’s DJ Chud, a San Antonio teen whose music hits like an aurora borealis fractured into neon shrapnel, and djmegan23, a wizard of waterlogged edits and songs sprinkled with fairy dust.
I was initially frustrated by the founder’s secrecy, but then admired it—nowadays everything is a click away, Google’s AI agent offers succinct TL;DRs, there’s a real shortage of freak-projects. The channel’s deluge of dreck reflects the slop-saturation of the music world but twists it into something oddly enlightening, with a sense of curation difficult to put into words. It captures the vibe of being young and malleable, finding something so startling it retrains your neurons a little, pushing you to wonder things like: What the hell is the Latvian jumpstyle scene? In a sense, it’s a little personally dismaying to have done this interview, to solve my question of who the maniac behind this account is. One less mystery in a world folding into a frictionless screen. At least there’s still perplexing songs to listen to. As I wrote this, Music Place reposted a dozen more.