Loreline (loreline.live) is a collaborative story platform where anyone can upload footage, photos, and clips and assemble them into a "loreline", a living visual story that plays back in chronological order, with scenes ordered by the real date they happened.

How does Loreline work?

Each loreline is a timeline of scenes (photos, video clips, or embedded media such as YouTube). Scenes are placed by their real capture date, so the finished loreline plays back as a chronological story. Multiple people can contribute to the same public loreline, so the story grows and evolves over time.

What can you do on Loreline?

You can create your own story from scratch, browse and watch public lorelines on topics like history, music, sports, film, and culture, contribute footage to open community stories, and embed any public loreline into a blog or article.

Is Loreline the same as the open-source interactive-fiction language?

No. loreline.live is a collaborative story platform for building chronological visual stories. It is unrelated to any same-named programming or interactive-fiction language.

Music

306 public collections on Loreline.

Documentaries

Reggae GeelEurope's oldest and best-loved reggae festival, in the Belgian town of Geel, from a 1978 sound-system bashment under a clear summer sky to 40,000 people making a yearly pilgrimage to what artists call the most Jamaican festival outside Jamaica. Live bands joined the sound systems in 1981, and every first weekend of August since, the roots, the dub forest and the dancehall have brought reggae royalty to a Belgian field: Desmond Dekker, U-Roy, Bunny Wailer, Toots, Alpha Blondy, Lee Scratch Perry, Damian Marley, Capleton, Chronixx, Buju Banton and the Marley generation. The sound systems, the legendary sets, the artists, the crowd and the culture of Reggae Geel.
CactusfestivalThe story of Cactusfestival, from a leftist café on a Bruges square in 1982 to the single-stage festival on the swan lake of Minnewaterpark. Four decades of world music, soul, reggae and indie: Gil Scott-Heron, Salif Keïta, Patti Smith, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Massive Attack and Grace Jones, all on one stage under the trees.
PANDAKlejvi Panda plays progressive and organic house in Tirana, and before that he was a kayaker with a national championship medal. His Instagram runs from 2015 to now and holds both: the Vjosa and the Llogara pass and a backflip off a rock, then Tunèl at closing time, ION Festival on the beach at Dhërmi, Snowboxx in the French Alps, a set played in the Gjipe canyon, two broadcasts for HÖR in Berlin. It is his own camera throughout, the poster for Friday, the drive home, the airport nap, the river. The archive keeps the sport and the nightlife side by side, in the order they happened, because that is how the feed actually reads.
JungleIt begins with six seconds of drums from a 1969 B-side. Gregory Coleman played them on The Winstons' "Amen, Brother", Richard Spencer held the copyright and was paid nothing for them for decades, and sped up and chopped over sound system bass they became the rhythmic basis of jungle. This archive follows that music from the rave hardcore it separated from, through the years when it was built in London bedrooms, cut to dubplate at Music House, broadcast from tower blocks on Kool FM and Don FM before any legal station would touch it, and danced to at Jungle Fever, Telepathy and AWOL. It is a Black British music with its roots in Jamaican sound system culture, and the records here say so. It follows what happened next as well: the mid-nineties split when jungle became drum and bass and the name changed with it, and the revival that has made jungle a current concern again rather than a historical one. The dates are the dates of the music, not of the uploads: almost nothing here survives on an official channel, so a set taped off the radio in 1994 and posted in 2019 is filed in 1994.
WoodstockFour men in their twenties set out to build a recording studio in Woodstock, New York, and ended up booking a dairy farm forty miles away for a weekend in August 1969. They sold about 186,000 tickets and expected perhaps fifty thousand people. Somewhere north of four hundred thousand came, the roads seized solid, the fences came down, and the festival became free because there was no other option left. Then it rained. What happened over those three days and the Monday morning that followed, Richie Havens improvising "Freedom" because the other acts were stuck in traffic, Santana breaking through on "Soul Sacrifice", Sly and the Family Stone at three in the morning, Hendrix playing the national anthem at nine on Monday to a field that had mostly gone home, became the defining image of a generation, largely because a young director named Michael Wadleigh filmed it and won an Academy Award for it. The name has been borrowed ever since, most notoriously in 1999, when it burned. This archive is the whole of it: the organising, the sets in the order they were actually played, the crowd and the mud, the film and the records, the later festivals, and the long argument about how much of the myth was ever true.
Chicago HouseThe birthplace of house music. From the disco ashes and Frankie Knuckles at The Warehouse, through Jesse Saunders’ first house record and Marshall Jefferson’s "Move Your Body", the Trax and DJ International labels, the acid-house explosion of the Roland TB-303, the deep-house of Larry Heard, to the sound that conquered the world. The story of how Chicago invented house.
Manu ChaoJosé-Manuel Chao formed Mano Negra in Paris in 1987 and spent the next eight years playing patchanka to crowds who mostly could not tell which of six languages a song was in. The band sailed a cargo ship to Latin America for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus with a Nantes street rebuilt in the hold, then repaired a derelict Colombian train and played villages along abandoned track until most of the group went home. He has released records under his own name since Clandestino in 1998 and has toured almost continuously since. The dates here follow the release or the performance rather than the upload, because the whole Mano Negra catalogue was re-delivered digitally on one day in March 2021 and would otherwise collapse into it. He has said plainly that he is neither a symbol nor a spokesman, and this archive takes him at his word.
Die Verdammte SpielereiThe craziest walking orchestra of the Western Hemisphere, Ghent’s street-theatre saxophone wonder-orchestra since 2006: four saxes, a drum and Herr Kapellmeister Stefaan De Winter, from the Gentse Feesten to Scheire en de Schepping.
Michael JacksonThe King of Pop. From a kid singing lead for the Jackson 5 in Gary, Indiana, to the best-selling album of all time, the moonwalk, the music videos that remade the medium and the biggest tours on earth, and through the allegations, trials and tabloid storms that shadowed his later life, to his sudden death in 2009 and a legacy still argued over today. The whole story, all angles.
Mac MillerMalcolm McCormick recorded as Mac Miller for eight years, from a Pittsburgh bedroom to a major label, and produced much of it himself under the name Larry Fisherman. The run goes K.I.D.S. and Best Day Ever, Blue Slide Park, the turn on Watching Movies with the Sound Off, Faces, GO:OD AM, The Divine Feminine, Swimming, and Circles, which was finished after his death and released in 2020. This archive follows the work: the tapes, the albums, the live sets, and the studio footage he shot in unusual quantity while records were being made. Dates follow the release rather than the upload, because the catalogue was posted to YouTube in batches years after the fact.
FunkIn February 1965 James Brown walked into a Charlotte studio and cut a record where the emphasis landed on the first beat instead of the backbeat, and where almost nothing changed harmonically for three minutes. Everything here comes from that rearrangement. Funk gave the world the break that hip hop was built on, the bassline that house and techno borrowed, and the drum pattern that jungle chopped into a genre; the seven seconds of an obscure 1969 B-side may be the most reused music ever recorded, and the drummer who played it died homeless. This archive follows the music by strain rather than by decade: the Godfather and his band, the P-Funk mythology, Sly, the horn bands, New Orleans, jazz players playing funk, Fela and Afrobeat, the DC go-go pocket, both Brazils, the talk-box early eighties, the West Coast rebuild, and the analogue revival that carried it to now. It is deliberately not only American, because funk stopped being only American almost immediately.
RockThe whole story of rock, told by subgenre through the performances, music videos and moments that made it. From the blues and rockabilly roots and the British Invasion to psychedelia and prog, from Led Zeppelin and Queen to the Ramones and the Clash, from Black Sabbath and Metallica to Nirvana and the Strokes, plus the moments that changed everything, from Woodstock to Live Aid.
Album CoverLandmark LP / album covers from 1955 to 2024, 88 sleeves across 6 eras: LP Era, Rock Mythology, Post-Punk + MTV, Sample & CD, the MP3 Decade, and the Streaming Era.
ReggaeThe whole story of reggae, from the ska and rocksteady of newly-independent 1960s Jamaica to the roots-reggae golden age, from Bob Marley carrying the music to the world to Peter Tosh, Burning Spear and the legends who defined it, from the studio science of dub and King Tubby to the raw and digital rhythms of dancehall, the sound systems where it was all born, and its spread from Kingston to London, Africa and beyond, all held together by the Rastafari faith and culture that gives the music its message.
Boom FestivalIn August 1997 a few thousand people gathered in a forest at Herdade do Zambujal, south of Lisbon, for a Goa trance party that lasted several days. Boom has since become one of the most-copied templates in festival culture: a week-long gathering on the shore of a Portuguese reservoir, built around a main stage called the Dance Temple, a talks and workshops programme called Liminal Village, and an approach to sustainability that is unusually specific for an industry that mostly gestures at it. Compost toilets counted and reported, greywater treated on site, structures dismantled and reused rather than burned. Its harm-reduction service, Kosmicare, has produced nine peer-reviewed papers, including the finding that of 245 samples sold as LSD at Boom 2014, barely two thirds were actually LSD. This archive follows the festival from that first forest to the present: the editions and their films, the Dance Temple, the art and architecture that gets built and taken down again, the ideas programme, and the people who camp by the lake every other July.
TechnoA genre invented by Black teenagers in Detroit and its suburbs on machines the Japanese companies that built them considered commercial failures. Juan Atkins put out "Alleys of Your Mind" in 1981; the word was in local use by 1984, and a British label fixed it to the market in 1988 after the Detroit artists voted down a plan to sell them as house. Radio carried it first: the Electrifying Mojo was playing their mixes on air by 1981, inside a Black Detroit format that ran Kraftwerk next to P-Funk, and Jeff Mills was The Wizard on WJLB before he was Jeff Mills. It reached Europe and found rooms that suited it, in a Frankfurt club from 1984 and a West Berlin one from 1988, before the Wall came down and handed Berlin a city full of empty buildings. Since then: a vault under a department store, a parade that grew to a million people and ended in twenty-one deaths that no court ever assigned responsibility for, a power station in Friedrichshain, and a German heritage listing in 2024 that most of the press reported wrong. This archive runs from 1981 to 2026 and treats Detroit as the centre it actually is.
DNBIt starts with a six-second drum break from a 1969 B-side. Sped up and chopped over sound-system bass at the hardcore raves of the early nineties, it became jungle, a music built in London bedrooms, cut to dubplate, and broadcast from tower-block pirate stations before any label would touch it. By 1995 it had a canon of its own: Goldie, LTJ Bukem, Photek, Roni Size. Then it split and kept splitting, the dark precision of techstep and neurofunk, the melodic warmth of liquid, the rolling weight of jump-up, and turned into an unusually label-shaped music, where Metalheadz, Hospital, RAM and V Recordings each stood for a sound. This is that whole arc: the raves, the records, the MCs and pirate radio, and the festivals from Rampage in Antwerp to Let It Roll.
DiscoThe rise, reign and afterlife of disco, the four-on-the-floor sound that took over the world. From Philly soul and Giorgio Moroder's Munich machine to Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage, from Donna Summer, Chic and the Bee Gees to Disco Demolition Night and the house and nu-disco that carried its DNA into the future. Told through the real performances, music videos, club footage and artifacts.
MonegrosEurope's largest desert rave, held on a stretch of Aragonese semi-desert between Candasnos and Fraga. It began in 1994 as a party for 250 regulars of the Arnau family's club, Florida 135, ran through the Groove Parade years, took the Monegros Desert Festival name at its tenth edition in 2004, and grew to 42,000 before stopping dead after 2014. Seven years of silence, then a return in 2022 to 55,000 people and twenty-two hours of uninterrupted music across ten stages. This is the archive of it, the club tapes it came from, the sets played out on the dust, the sunrise, and the films the festival makes about itself.
MobyMoby, Richard Melville Hall, from a Connecticut squat to selling twenty million records. The whole forty-year arc: the hardcore-punk kid, the early-90s rave hero of "Go", the ambitious "Everything Is Wrong", the guitar detour of "Animal Rights", and then Play, the 1999 album that licensed every track and sold twelve million, through 18, Hotel, the David-Lynch-directed "Wait for Me", the Void Pacific Choir, the orchestral Reprise, and his latest work. The music, the videos, the live shows, the story behind the songs, and the lifelong vegan-and-animal-rights activism.
2PacTupac Amaru Shakur, 1971-1996. His mother was on trial with the Panther 21 while she was pregnant with him; he studied ballet and Shakespeare in Baltimore; he made four albums in five years and one of them went to number one while he was in prison. He was shot dead in Las Vegas at twenty-five and the case stayed open for twenty-seven years. Built from the interview record, because he talked more, and more carefully, than almost anyone else of his generation.
Pink FloydA band named off a single sleeve note, from a 1962 Blind Boy Fuller record where Paul Oliver listed Pink Anderson and Floyd Council among Piedmont players who had never met each other. They began as the house band of the London underground with Syd Barrett writing, and lost him in the least dramatic way imaginable: David Gilmour joined as a fifth member, and one morning in January 1968 the others simply did not collect Barrett for a gig. What followed was a decade of building rooms out of sound, quadraphonic rigs and a co-ordinator that moved noise around a hall, films projected behind the stage, an inflatable pig that got loose over Battersea, and a wall built across the front of an arena and knocked down again. Then the fights: Wright pushed out during the record he was playing on, Waters in the High Court in 1986 trying to dissolve the thing, a settlement rather than a verdict, and two decades of the members giving irreconcilable accounts of the same events. This archive is built from what can actually be watched, which since 2020 has included the band posting their own concert films for free, and it covers the losses from the documented record rather than the legend.
Sweet CityTienen is Belgium’s Suikerstad, the Sugar City. Since 1836 the Tiense Suikerraffinaderij has turned the sugar beet of Flemish Brabant into the sweetness that gave the town its name, its smell every autumn campaign, and its identity. From that heritage grew the SWEET CITY FESTIVAL: a free open-air music festival on Tienen’s grand Grote Markt at the start of summer, with a cosy Winter Edition in the Manege. This is the story of both, the sugar that makes the city sweet, and the festival that carries the name onto the square.
Unday RecordsUnday Records, the Ghent label founded in 2011 as "a safe haven for adventurous indie music", home to some of the most uncompromising voices in Belgian pop, rock and jazz. From Trixie Whitley's breakthrough Fourth Corner and Tamino's international rise to the Bert Dockx universe (Flying Horseman, Dans Dans), Het Zesde Metaal, Nordmann, Hydrogen Sea and the whole roster, the label and its artists, told through their own music.
EurovisionA chronicle of 333 defining Eurovision Song Contest moments, from the first contest in Lugano (1956) to the most recent grand final. Each scene a story: the artist, the song, the night, the country, what it meant. Built from Eurovision Oracle by Ludwig Vonmesser, a folio of the Codex Vloriensis.
House MusicHouse music, from a members-only warehouse on Chicago's South Jefferson Street to the sound under most of pop radio. Built by Black and Latino people, many of them gay, out of drum machines their own manufacturers had discontinued, then carried to New York, Ibiza, Britain, Johannesburg and Paris. Includes the correction most references get wrong: kwaito is house, by its own originators' testimony, not hip-hop.
Lokerse FeestenThe legendary Belgian music festival on the Grote Kaai in Lokeren. Since 1974, every early August, Lokerse Feesten has packed ten days with one of the most eclectic line-ups in Europe, punk and new wave, pop and rock, hip-hop and Flemish acts, from the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop to Pet Shop Boys, Blur, the Pixies and the homegrown heroes. Fifty years of one of Flanders’ best-loved festivals.
KavinskyKavinsky, Vincent Belorgey, the blue-skinned, red-eyed zombie racer of French electro. The story goes that he crashed his Ferrari Testarossa in 1986 and came back in 2006 to make music, and from that Record Makers debut he built a whole neon world: "Testarossa Autodrive", the SebastiAn remixes of the Ed Banger years, and then "Nightcall", sung by Lovefoxxx, co-produced with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel, and dropped over the opening credits of Drive to become a synthwave landmark. The 2013 album OutRun, the long silence, the 2022 return with Reborn, and Nightcall reborn once more at the Paris 2024 Olympics. The songs, the videos, the live sets, the remixes and the persona.
TranceTrance was named in Frankfurt around 1990, when a handful of producers working out of Eye Q and Harthouse found that a single arpeggio held long enough stopped being a riff and became something else. It spent the nineties turning into the biggest dance music on earth: Robert Miles slowing it down, Oakenfold and Sasha carrying it through the superclubs, Gatecrasher and Cream and Amnesia filling every weekend, and a run of records, Café del Mar, For An Angel, Out Of The Blue, Sandstorm, 9pm, that a generation can still hum. By 2003 a Dutch DJ filled a football stadium on his own and then played the Olympics. Then it crashed, split into uplifting and progressive and tech, lost the mainstream to electro house, and kept going anyway, on the festival circuit and the radio show that never stopped. This is the whole arc: the records, the sets, the clubs and the people.
PsytrancePsychedelic trance began as a DJ practice on a beach. Through the 1970s and 80s the freaks who wintered in Anjuna and Vagator swapped guitars for tape decks, and by the early 1990s the edits they played at the full-moon parties had become a genre of its own, Goa trance, with its own labels in London and Tel Aviv and its own canon of records. Then it split, over and over: the Israeli full-on that filled arenas, the darkpsy and forest strains that went the other way into the night, the patient progressive sound, the psychill of the chillout dome, and a global festival circuit from Boom in Portugal to Ozora in Hungary to Universo Paralello on a Brazilian beach. This is that whole evolution, the records, the parties, the archival footage and the people.
LIVEThe greatest live-performance moments in music history, from every genre, rock, pop, hip-hop, R&B and soul, metal, electronic, country, jazz and blues, Latin, punk, reggae, classical and opera, funk and disco, gospel and K-pop. Hendrix at Woodstock, Queen at Live Aid and Prince in the rain, but also Metallica in Moscow, Marley in Santa Barbara, the Three Tenors in Rome, Nina Simone at Montreux, Fela Kuti live, Daft Punk’s pyramid, Rototom soundsystems, warehouse techno, hardcore circle pits and gospel choirs bringing the house down. The nights the crowd lost it and music became history.
BoomtownThe story of Boomtown Fair, the immersive theatre-and-music festival that builds an entire city on the Matterley Estate each August, then tears it down. From a 1,000-person gathering in a Gloucestershire forest in 2009 to a 77,000-strong metropolis of districts, sound systems and interactive narrative, told through the official aftermovies, the stage-build films, the sets in the Lion's Den, and the citizens who live inside the tale for five days a year.
System of a DownFour Armenian-Americans from Glendale who became one of the most unlikely and uncompromising bands in metal, the songs, the albums, the live legend, and a lifelong fight to have the Armenian Genocide recognised.
Electric LoveElectric Love, Austria's biggest electronic music festival, held every July at the Salzburgring near Salzburg since 2013. From 20,000 fans in its first year to 180,000+ across three days, told through the footage filmed on site: the lavish official aftermovies, the pyrotechnic opening ceremonies, and the mainstage headliner sets from Armin van Buuren, Axwell /\ Ingrosso, Tiësto, Steve Aoki, Marshmello, Alan Walker and more.
MoDem FestivalMO:DEM, a psytrance festival held in a Croatian forest. The festival records itself unusually well, complete sets from The Hive going back years, official aftermovies, films about the visual artists, and a lecture programme on everything from functional fungi to sacred architecture. Built almost entirely from that public record, plus the phone footage of the people who were standing in the trees at four in the morning.
AgimiUnderground Agimi runs club nights in a former cinema on Bulevardi Bajram Curri in Tirana, a hall built in the 1950s, later a municipal art centre, and since the summer of 2024 a room that fills up on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The archive is the venue's own record of itself: a flyer for every night, the DJs who played them, the crowd that turned up, the people behind the bar, and the room itself changing decor and coming back down again. It runs from late 2023 to now.
HellfestThe story of Hellfest, from the doomed Furyfest of the early 2000s to the metal cathedral of Clisson that draws 60,000 a day: every headliner era, the six stages, the Hellfangs, and the controversies that tried to shut it down.
RAD ArchiveA mirror of radarchive.org by Ludwig Vonmesser (Codex Vloriensis). 7,139 annotated music videos spanning 1966–2026, regrouped by genre family. Every scene is a YouTube embed of the original video; descriptions retain RAD's curatorial annotations.
PopPop is the music that had to sell. It begins with a machine, Edison's phonograph in 1877, and everything after is downstream of the fact that a performance could suddenly be a product. The disc, the 45, the transistor radio, the cassette, MTV, Napster, the iPod, Spotify and TikTok each rearranged what a song was allowed to be: how long, how loud, how quickly it had to get to the chorus. Around that machinery grew an industry very good at manufacturing feeling on schedule, Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown, the Swedish songwriting camps, the Korean training system, and a century-long argument about whether music made that way can be any good, which mostly ended when the critics lost. The centre of gravity has moved too. The story is not only Elvis and the Beatles and Taylor Swift; it is Teresa Teng and Umm Kulthum, Lata Mangeshkar and Hikaru Utada, Seo Taiji, Daddy Yankee, Burna Boy and Bad Bunny, who won Album of the Year in 2026 with a record in Spanish. This archive is the whole apparatus: the records, the stars, the technology, the machine, the sound, the argument, the show, and where it all stands now.

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