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 individual people — music critics, musicians, and a few carefully chosen lists from around the web. The only way to make a random sampler work for recommendations is if the population sampled from is full of wonderful things, and this one is — a carefully designed warren where you can go directly 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 using search, and they can be combined — you can filter on African music from the 70's, for instance, or norwegian black metal, or jazz guitar.

• with you can both search for albums, labels, critics, musicians, etc. and also add filters for them, so here is where you customize the sampler.
• has links to some commonly-used filters, and any filters you have selected will also show up here.
• will allow logged-in users to save albums to a collection. For example, here is a collection of some of my favorite albums.
• contains links to Wikipedia, Discogs, Bandcamp, etc. for whatever album or artist page you're on.

Shfl also runs reviews and guides to various musical nooks & crannies — writers who have contributed to Shfl include Sasha Frere-Jones, Oliver Wang, Ashawnta Jackson, Paula Mejía, Zev Kane, Ned Raggett, Joe Muggs, Nate Patrin, Erin Macleod, Michaelangelo Matos, Phil Freeman, Amaya García, Rick Anderson, Jeff Treppel, Nate LeBlanc, Miles Marshall Lewis, Megan Iacobini de Fazio, Jon Dale, Marcos Hassan, Mina Tavakoli, Alex Riggs, Sean Wood, Harold Heath, and Beatriz Miranda.

Shfl can be easily installed on your phone, and where possible every album is linked to a streaming location, so it's very easy to give something totally unfamiliar a shot. I can be reached by email with any questions or suggestions, and you can also follow Shfl on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter to be alerted when we put up something new. Thanks, and have fun!