Music Catalog

About this catalog

A small fictional music catalog used as a worked example for Another Mood.

The shape mirrors the kind of read-only inventory a label or fan-run site might keep: a handful of artists, the labels they release through, a hierarchy of genres, the albums themselves, the tracks each album contains, and a few curated playlists that cross-cut everything.

The point of the showcase is not the music. It is to demonstrate how the schema, content, view, and template layers compose into a browsable site - including grouping by a field, joining one entity to another, walking a self-referential hierarchy, and preserving rows whose joins return no match.

Everything is invented

Every artist, label, and recording in this dataset is fictional. Prose documents can point at this section with a plain relative link, heading fragment included (../background.md#everything-is-invented) - the build rewrites it to land on this heading wherever the document is rendered.

Heading fragments survive views, too. Each album page embeds its liner notes inline, so a document can point straight at the Tidal Atlas liner notes as they appear on that album’s page.

Front page

The front matter is one record, catalog, read straight from the root along with two plain values beside it, updated_at and moods (the single-record pattern). The series map arrives as a list with each key lifted into id, like any other map.

Kept by The editorial desk; last revised 2026-10-12. Moods: nocturnal, industrial, coastal.

Featured

Each entry comes with its album attached by the featured_albums view, which names the collection inside the front matter as from: catalog.featured.

• Tidal Atlas (2019) - The record that put Coastal Tapes on the map.
• Winter in the Machine (2014) - Newest arrival, cover art included.

Series

• City Nights (city_nights) - Records made for streets after dark.
  • Neon After Rain
  • Last Train to Dawn
• Live Rooms (live_rooms) - Concert recordings, small rooms first.
  • Last Train - Live at the Garage
  • Neon After Rain - Live in Osaka

Editor’s picks

Signed by Midori Circuit.

• Diesel Hymn - Five minutes of engine-room gospel.
• Estuary Mirror - Best heard with the window open.

Artists

• Midori Circuit - Japan
• Lighthouse Collective - Portugal
• Nine-Thirty West - United States
• Amber Ghost - Germany
• Vacant Canvas - Iceland

Midori Circuit

Country: Japan
Formed: 2014

A Tokyo-based duo who build patient techno out of field recordings made on overnight commuter trains.

Members

Discography

• Neon After Rain (2018)
• Neon After Rain - Live in Osaka (2019)

Lighthouse Collective

Country: Portugal
Formed: 2017

A Lisbon five-piece whose psychedelic guitar suites are recorded almost entirely in coastal cottages over long weekends.

Members

Discography

• Tidal Atlas (2019)
• Dawn Cassette (2022)

Nine-Thirty West

Country: United States
Formed: 2009

A Detroit punk trio whose songs rarely cross the three-minute mark and almost always end on a slammed-shut door.

Members

Discography

• Factory Lullabies (2012)
• Last Train to Dawn (2015)
• Last Train - Live at the Garage (2016)

Amber Ghost

Country: Germany
Formed: 2003

A Berlin post-punk outfit known for long-form ballads built around analogue synth drones and brittle baritone vocals.

Members

Discography

• Graphite Summer (2008)
• Winter in the Machine (2014)

Vacant Canvas

Country: Iceland
Formed: 2021

A Reykjavik quartet still working toward a debut release; their roster entry is intentionally light - no released albums and no settled line-up yet.

Members

No active line-up on record.

Discography

No releases yet.

Albums by genre

The genre name comes straight from the genres_with_albums view, which reads the grouped albums_by_genre view and joins genres onto it (a view-to-view reference) - so the template no longer re-joins genres itself.

• Techno
  • Neon After Rain (2018)
  • Neon After Rain - Live in Osaka (2019)
• Psychedelic Rock
  • Tidal Atlas (2019)
  • Dawn Cassette (2022)
• Punk
  • Factory Lullabies (2012)
  • Last Train to Dawn (2015)
  • Last Train - Live at the Garage (2016)
• Post-Punk
  • Graphite Summer (2008)
  • Winter in the Machine (2014)

Neon After Rain

2018 · Studio album

Tracklist

Liner notes

Neon After Rain was tracked in a single humid week in Midori Circuit’s home studio, a converted laundry room where the old compressor still kicked in halfway through takes. The rain of the title is literal: the record was mixed during the wet season with the windows left open.

The cover — a long-exposure of a crossing seen through a fogged bus window — was shot that same week, and its palette is the one the mixes kept chasing: magenta bleeding into wet asphalt.

The back cover lists the tracks over the same palette.

The scene, the artwork, and the band, like everything in this catalog, are invented.

Neon After Rain - Live in Osaka

2019 · Live recording

Tracklist

Tidal Atlas

2019 · Studio album

Tracklist

Liner notes

Tidal Atlas was assembled over three weekends in a rented bungalow on the southern Portuguese coast. The collective set up two condenser microphones in the kitchen and one in the bathroom, then ignored every studio convention they had picked up over the previous decade.

The closing track grew out of an unplanned thirty-minute jam recorded at low tide on the second morning. It was kept almost intact.

The loose, room-recorded feel here was tightened into something glossier three years later on Dawn Cassette.

The collective, like everything in this catalog, is invented.

Dawn Cassette

2022 · Studio album

Tracklist

Factory Lullabies

2012 · Studio album

Tracklist

Last Train to Dawn

2015 · Studio album

Tracklist

Last Train - Live at the Garage

2016 · Live recording

Tracklist

Graphite Summer

2008 · Studio album

Tracklist

Winter in the Machine

2014 · Studio album

Tracklist

Liner notes

Recorded across two winters in a converted boiler plant outside Berlin. The building’s heating system became an unintended fourth member of the band - several tracks include the low hum of the radiator pipes at the threshold of audibility.

The record is, in the band’s own words, the place where their early goth instincts finally agreed to share a room with their electronics.

It was a deliberate turn away from the guitar-driven Graphite Summer that came six years before.

Genre hierarchy

• Rock
  • Punk
    • Post-Punk
  • Psychedelic Rock
• Electronic
  • Ambient
  • Techno

Labels

Concert recordings

These albums are surfaced by the live_albums view (where: { id: { startswith: live_ } }).

• Neon After Rain - Live in Osaka (2019)
• Last Train - Live at the Garage (2016)

Live tracks

Tracks whose title contains “Live” (where: { title: { contains: Live } }).

Band rosters

Flattened from the artists.members nested map.

Discography (LEFT-join view)

Every artist appears once, including those with no released albums (artist_album_pairs_all uses flatten: { preserve_empty: true }).

• Midori Circuit (midori_circuit) - Neon After Rain (2018)
• Midori Circuit (midori_circuit) - Neon After Rain - Live in Osaka (2019)
• Lighthouse Collective (lighthouse_collective) - Tidal Atlas (2019)
• Lighthouse Collective (lighthouse_collective) - Dawn Cassette (2022)
• Nine-Thirty West (nine_thirty_west) - Factory Lullabies (2012)
• Nine-Thirty West (nine_thirty_west) - Last Train to Dawn (2015)
• Nine-Thirty West (nine_thirty_west) - Last Train - Live at the Garage (2016)
• Amber Ghost (amber_ghost) - Graphite Summer (2008)
• Amber Ghost (amber_ghost) - Winter in the Machine (2014)
• Vacant Canvas (vacant_canvas) - no releases yet

Full track index

Each track joined to its album and the album’s artist (tracks_with_artist, multi-join list form).

Playlists

Each playlist’s track list comes from the playlists_with_tracks view, a two-hop view-to-view chain: playlist_entries joins tracks onto playlist_tracks (so the title travels with each link), and playlists_with_tracks nests those entries under each playlist - so the template neither re-filters playlist_tracks nor re-looks-up track titles.

Staff Picks

Curated by editorial. A short rotating selection assembled by the editorial desk.

1. Neon After Rain
2. Estuary Mirror
3. Last Train to Dawn
4. Graphite Summer

Late Night Drive

Curated by midori_circuit. Guest curation from Midori Circuit for long, dark motorway runs.

1. Quiet Districts
2. Tidal Atlas
3. Dawn Cassette
4. Boiler Room
5. Winter in the Machine

Side B

Curated by editorial. Slow burners and second-side closers - tracks that need at least five minutes of room.

1. Quiet Districts (Live)
2. Service Tunnel (Live)
3. Tidal Atlas
4. Dawn Cassette