Shfl is a music recommendation tool — one that depends only on the very simplest algorithm of them all, random sampling. It is built from a massive number of specific recommendations from music critics, musicians, and a few carefully chosen lists from around the web. There’s no robots peeking over your shoulder here, we’re trying to optimize for surprise, which is why you can go straight from Danny Brown to Scarlatti.

Shfl is a big, densely-connected graph — there’s lots of ways to customize your path through it. Tapping on a tag or the icons next to the date, label, or album recommender will restrict the sampler to albums that share that attribute. Filters can also be added manually, and they can be combined — you can filter on African music from the 70’s, for instance, or norwegian black metal, or jazz guitar. If you’re not sure where to start, we also publish guides to various musical subjects, collections of albums grouped by topic, and there’s a best-of section with jumping-off points for many of the most popular genres on the site.