Opening / who he is. TheScientist introduces himself as a member known offsite as Freewave, on RYM since 2004. He notes the irony that music wasn't really part of his life as a teenager — it wasn't a big factor growing up, options were limited back then, and he had no sense of how central it would become or how much its absence had shaped his earlier years.
The Denver years. Things changed for him in college in Denver, Colorado, where he became a regular at used CD stores, feeding roughly a $30-a-week habit digging through the bins. That grew into working at a CD store, going out to nightclubs, meeting his wife, and taking up DJing on the side. The fun had a cost, though — weekends downtown, hauling his own gear, working through snowstorms — and the grind wore thin fairly quickly.
Finding RYM and becoming "the list guy." Like everyone, he found the internet reshaped how he discovered and collected music. On RYM he became known as the list person, in a looser, more free-flowing era of the site. His early lists leaned genre-focused, and he always carved out time to explore and write about what he loved or stumbled onto. Underneath it was a compulsion to collect and catalog everything he came across — a kind of diary of sound. A career in IT plus a wife who shared his love of music gave him the time to make it possible. After about five years of listing, collecting live bootlegs, and running a lot of music blogs, a 2009 conversation kicked around the idea of a collaborative virtual "box set" project — a user effort to map out the essential artists, albums, and even key tracks for every genre.
Spearheading the RYM Ultimate Box Set. He jumped on it and never looked back, keeping the project alive through family life and his own music-making with a rotating crew of volunteers. This is where his research philosophy crystallized — figuring out where to find the best information, how to use sources well, working through genres chronologically, and building guides that defined them. A guiding principle was to show how a genre developed rather than just tell, leaning on well-chosen quotes that reveal something about the music. He points out that the project surfaced many genres on RYM before they were widely recognized, moving them along the pipeline from set, to queue, to officially approved genre — making the sets useful groundwork for future genre submissions. Over time he came to see the lines between genre, scene, movement, and concept as a minor distinction, since they're all just shorthand for a slice of musical history and a shared approach.
Where things stood that year. He describes a renewed focus on the project, with his wife and kids alongside him — helped by a good new job with more free time and less stress, and by having fully come through a long battle with depression, which made a real difference. He mentions staying active with regular tweets, a new blog portal, and better contact with collaborators on Discord. By then the project had passed 1,200 genre sets and around 1,600 discs of music, with the blog making it all easier to browse, and an ongoing push toward a YouTube and Spotify playlist for every set. He closes with thanks to everyone who'd contributed past and present, framing it as a genre guide that bests just about anything else online and a beacon for music lovers — a place to find more of what one likes, learn its history, and discover what one hasn't even encountered yet.
The set picks (5 his + 5 others). This is the section the fragments cover only partly, so treat it as incomplete:
Of his own sets, two are clear. In his Disco set he highlighted Cerrone's Supernature (Cerrone 3) — a known classic that he felt remained underappreciated and underplayed in the US, praising both the synthetic title cut and the more organic "Give Me Love" as elegant and innovative, and using it to show how attuned the French have long been to disco, house, and electro. He also featured his Synthwave set, describing it as a genre that won him over for having one foot in the past and one in the future.
Of the five sets by others, three are recoverable: Japanese Vanguard by phthora (his condensed companion to the Japanese Vanguard/Underground guide, a roughly 7-disc tour across about a dozen genres, with Kazumoto Endo flagged as a great alternative entry point to Japan's noise scene beyond Merzbow); Doom Metal by TheTrickster (one of the project's earliest contributors from 2009, an 8-disc set with detailed notes that he called a standout monument to the genre, alongside TheTrickster's Death, Black, and Thrash guides); and Tribal Ambient & Ritual Ambient by Xaman_.
