E.M.M.A. — Experimental Metal Mapping Atlas · 851 bands · 3128 connections · 154 split releases
E.M.M.A. is a map of avant-garde and experimental extreme music. Bands are dots, and the lines between them are actual connections: two bands that shared a member, played on each other’s records, released on the same label, or used the same producer.
Every band is scored 0–9 across 16 axes. Five are core axes (Hardcore, Death, Black, Doom, Technical). The other eleven are weird axes, which is where the real experimentation shows up.
Only weird-axis scores of 3 or higher count. Add them up, plus a point for each axis that counted — breadth matters — and you get the band’s Experimental Index (EI). An EI of 7 or more gets the band a full node with their own page.
Connections count too. Sharing a member with a qualifying band is worth +3, and so is appearing together on a split release. A collaboration is worth +1. The whole bonus is capped at +4. Note qualifying — only bands that made the cut on their own can pass the bonus along.
If a band falls short of the threshold but shares a member with a full node, they show up as a satellite: smaller, dimmer, and with a slim card instead of a full page. That way the map stays complete without watering down the database.
A few foundational acts don’t clear the formula on paper and are in anyway, because leaving them out would be strange. Those are labelled as such.
Core axes measure how conventionally metal a band is. Weird axes feed the Experimental Index. If a band scores low on every core axis except Technical — complexity isn’t metal-ness — it gets a non-metal outline. It’s still a full member of the atlas, just easy to filter out if you only want metal.
Node size tracks EI, or whichever axis you pick to size by. Colour marks the scene. A star marks a pioneer: a band whose radical moves later became somebody else’s convention.
Edges come in ten kinds, but a stroke only tells you how strong a tie is: solid = same body (a shared member, or two eras of one band), dashed = worked together (a collaboration, a split release, a remix), dotted = chosen by a person (a band on a label one of them founded, or a shared producer), hairline = circumstantial (the same label roster, a tour, a cover artist). Open any band and each connection says in words exactly which of the ten it is. The legend at the bottom left of the map carries the full key and a “show unconnected” toggle.
A split release is a record, not a relationship — two or three bands on one pressing. Each band on one gains a +3 tie to the others, inside the same +4 cap. Browse the splits.
Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, Discogs, Metal Archives, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or an official site. Every relationship in the atlas carries the page it was confirmed on, and anything that couldn’t be confirmed is left empty rather than guessed.
The dataset is versioned in git; the changelog is derived from that history, so every entry corresponds to a real commit. RSS.
48 of the 851 bands are satellites, and plenty have no connections recorded yet — the atlas catalogues bands faster than it maps how they link up.
Nominations and corrections both go through GitHub, so the reasoning stays in the open alongside the data.