Rating Ratings

A short post this time around, as I'm just about to go out to the lake to celebrate the 4th of July, the holiday where one celebrates the birth of his or her country by blowing up a small part of it (to quote The Simpsons).

In any case, I recently had another high score published over at The Silent Ballet. This time the review was of Treasure State, a new collaboration between the New York avant-garde percussion quartet So Percussion and the Baltimore-based experimental electronica outfit Matmos.

I've said enough about the album in my actual review, so I won't rehash all that. The short version: the album kicks twelve kinds of ass. Go check it out ASAP. For te purposes of this blog post, I thought that I might say a few words about our scoring system.

I said up at the top that this was a high-scoring review if you read that and then were surprised to see an 8.5 at the top of the page, then you probably aren't very familiar with our scoring system. TSB's official policy n scoring is that a score of 5 ought to reflect an album that is perfectly average. Therefore, a score of 5.5 is a slightly positive score, while a 4.5 is a slightly negative score. Scores of 8 and above (and, correspondingly, scores of 2 or below are considered to be albums of exceptionally high (or low, on the other side) merit. As a website, we've never given out a score higher than 9.0, and we only have a few of those per year. So, on this scale, an 8.5 really is a pretty high score.

The intended goal of such a system is to ensure that high-scoring albums truly deserve their scores. I won't name names, but I'm sure you can think of a few websites that seem to hand out high scores like they were going out of style, where the most common score may be 4 out of 5 stars. This dilutes the value of a high score. I can assure you, if you see a high score at TSB, the album will have earned it.

On the other hand, I think it's a bit silly to have the top two scoring possibilities on the site as (apparently) unreachable. You can go back and forth on whether or not any album is deserving of the perfect 10, but I think that any score on the scale ought to be fair game. When it comes to a score of 9.5, that seems a bit ridiculous. (We actually did almost have a 9.5 once upon a time, actually, but unfortunately the score got cut down before publication. Ah well.)

Regardless, I think that having high scores actually mean something is a valiant goal. And maybe one day we'll actually use full spectrum.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to celebrate the national holiday of blowing shit up. Happy fourth of July, everyone!

Love Generation (Robot Version)

A short post this time around, because it's 3:30 in the morning and I have mono and really should be sleeping. Still, it's been about a week since I last wrote, and I want to try to try to write at least once a week for this blog, to ensure that I don't just forget about it and let it lie fallow.

Anyway! I have recently become enamored with with the song "Love Generation" by Bob Sinclair. Like most songs that I love, this one is excessively long, but unlike most music that I love, it isn't weird or experimental or anything like that. It's actually pretty much just pop music. But it's got this great, driving beat in it that just keep going seemingly into infinity, and the guitar keeps looping around, and there's a delightful tune being whistled in the background. Its basically everything you could ever hope to dance to, and it makes for great party music, and also great space out music. Those three don't coalesce very often.



So, after a semester of hearing this song, I finally decided I needed to have it on my computer. Feeling cheap (and also perhaps a bit altered from some of the medicine I'm taking to combat my illnesses), I tired to just record the above youtube video in Audacity, which is a free (and pretty damn powerful) audio recorder. However, I couldn't get it to record from my soundcard for some reason (probably related either to the illnesses or the medication), so instead I did something that would normally be rather stupid: I connected my computer's audio-out port (for speakers) to my audio-in port (for microphones). Then I hit record.

When I came back to the file nine minutes later, I found that I had not captured the music well at all. At least, I didn't capture it as Bob Sinclair wrote it. I did, however, create something totally awesome, totally by accident. By slaving my audio-in and -out ports together, I made everything sound all static-y and reverb-y, except that for some reason the vocals and the whistling came through just fine. The result is definitely not something that I would call party music, unless perhaps you're having a techno party, and then it might just be in order. If you're into electronica at all, I would recommend giving this new file a listen—I think it's quite amazing actually, and I can't believe it was a total accident. In case you're wondering, this is probably the definition of serendipity.

Oh, and headphones are recommended. And yes, this does mean that I somehow managed to turn one of the few long non-elitist songs that I like into something crazy, weird, and out-there. Accident, or subconscious impulse? The jury's still out.

Love Generation (Robot Version)

In other news, I had another review published at The Silent Ballet last week. This record's not as great, so I won't go too much into it, but if you're interested in reading it, here's a link. One of my writers also published a review of an interesting project related to Terry Riley's justly famous In C; if you're at all interested in (relatively) contemporary classical music, I suggest you check that one out much faster.

Oh yeah, and I'm done with that whole college thing now. How about that?