I’m spending more time focusing on programming and learning shit rather than playing music and reviewing it these days, sorry. I’m sure it’ll come back at some point though, may it be this autumn when my bass lessons start again and I grow more musical motivation. Who knows.

Until then, I invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed rather than visiting the page here and then. Hey, thanks for reading, regulars!

You thought the last one was nerdy? THINK TWICE! Here we learn how to encode music.

This is part 2

Part 1 can be read here. I’ll only focus on mp3 VBR converting, because usually, it’s going to be compatible with most stuff. For the best VBR quality, .ogg files should be what to look for.

Additional Information before going on

In the first part of this article, I’ve explained bit rates a bit, which would be enough to convert pieces the way you need it. This is nice if you want to set your parameters manually, but often, when looking for VBR information, you’ll stumble upon things like v0, v1, v2, etc. (the numbers go up to v9). Those are indicators of quality.

The lower the number, the higher the quality. v0 refers to a VBR bit rate going up to 320 kbps, and it’s the highest you can reach. v2 is considered to also be good quality, usually around the equivalent of CBR 192 kbps in terms of file size. In my opinion, you shouldn’t look for anything lower [quality wise] than v2. You should also choose the slowest encoding options for a better quality: 2 passes, slowest settings.

Know that VBR can not enhance quality. It can only reduce it, as with every compressing algorithm you’ll find. Encoding VBR with a max 320 kbps from a CBR 320 kbps file will result in a loss of quality, and so would encoding a VBR from a VBR of the exact same quality. Only encode to lower bit rates, from CDs or lossless formats like flac.

This being said, let’s go for some fast tutorials.

Windows: foobar2k

First thing you’ll need is the LAME pack to encode in Variable bit rate. You can get it here: http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php Save it on your desktop or anywhere you might find it when you need it again. The only files of the pack you’ll need are lame.exe and the dll coming with it.

Then, within foobar2k, you need to have enabled the Converter option when installing (’Optional Features -> Tools -> Converter’). I’ve got a custom theme, but so many people do, so sorry if it’s hard to follow. Anyway, here it is, in a simple way. First you need to load the tracks to convert in your playlist. Then, you select the files to convert > right click > Convert > Convert To…

A ‘converter setup’ window will pop up. Press the ‘More Settings’ button, then press ‘Add New’. In the new window, you can choose the settings for the VBR files. You can see the presets I used:

Then, all you have to do is confirm. Windows will pop a prompt asking you to locate the LAME encoder. Click on the .exe file. The file should start encoding soon.

Windows: Winamp Pro

Winamp has got the simplest way to encode to VBR I’ve found so far. It’s also one of the fastest ones in the few I tried. An important point is that only winamp pro will convert to VBR. Free versions will NOT do it. So you can either ‘buy‘ it or buy it.

Winamp is an overall great media player for windows, really easy to use, although you should avoid most of the bundled crap AOL is now shipping it with if you can.

Anyway, once it’s done installing, start winamp and insert your files into the playlist (the media library can also work). Right click on one or many files > send to: > Format converter. You can play with the settings, or take the ones I use (see below). Then just press ok and there you go, files converted! It’s as simple as it gets, really. You can even choose presets if you feel just sliding these things is too complex.

Windows XP - Linux (WINE): MediaCoder

Mediacoder is one of the best converters all-around. It can convert pretty much anything in audio and video, but sadly won’t work perfectly with anything that is not Windows up to XP. To use it, go grab mediacoder on sourceforge (and use the stable version if possible, my experience with mediacoder in general was filled with bugs). When everything is installed run it and put the files you want to convert in the top of the window.

Luckily, mediacoder is mainly complex with video. What I mean is encoding to VBR is a joke. Just use settings that look like the picture below for something close to the greatest quality. I guess you should have understood how to set high quality everywhere where sliders are by now.

The way to put settings vary between each version of mediacoder, but the basics remain the same. Then you just press ‘Start’ on the top of the window, and enjoy the ride.

Ubuntu: Amarok

This one’s going to be done with the amarok player. It usually comes right with the default repository, so you can just get it there. Once everything is set right, Go into Tools > Script manager. Then you go and press Get More Scripts to download the transKode script.

Before running the script, we’ll need the LAME library. It’s available in the default repo as far as I know. Just go grab it with the synaptic package manager.

You can then run the script. This is done in the script manager described above (and on the picture on the right). Press the configure button. Some default preset should be selected. You can go select whatever you want to convert the file in, but in this case, we’ll stick to mp3 VBR with LAME, thank you good night. Click on the little wrench to configure the script. You should see the settings.

To get the highest VBR quality possible, your settings should look like this:

Options like including CRC checksums [in the advanced tab] are only useful if you plan on streaming the song over the web. Anyway, you can now save your preset to use it again later. Check the ‘place entry in transcode context menu’ checkbox to have a fast access to the preset you just created.

You can also give faster settings by using the following lines (from lowest to best): –preset medium, –preset standard, –preset extreme. These will have neat presets so you don’t have to think too much. To convert a song, just right-click on it in the playlist: If transKode is running correctly, it’ll be in the list; that’s where you can choose to encode it.

Voilà, your file is now VBR!

Mac OSX

YOUR OS SUCKS, PLEASE SUFFER! To be honest, I just don’t have a Mac at home to test anything, so no instructions for you guys! good luck!

Conclusion

That should cover the basics to start encoding and transcoding your own files. If you have any question, just leave me a comment, I’ll be glad to answer. If I have enough questions, I may do a 3rd part to cover more, but right now, this is the end of the article. I hope I have helped some people.

This is what this is about. Overstretched images of money.

Selling out

Watching the stats for this site, I realized I didn’t quite a lot of viewers, but still a few, and a good amount of them being newcomers. I’ve been thinking about adding ads to the site. However, I don’t want to clutter the view of readers, much less have anything like interstitials or audio ads. In fact, if I could, I’d launch the people making them into the sun.

In any case, the site is certainly not free to host, and I possibly could cover the costs with some ad money. So I’m asking the regulars who feel like commenting if they feel like I should put up ads, and if so, where?

Places I’ve thought about were:

• The sidebar: I’m not too sure about that one, the design is not really made to support that;
• After a post and before the comments: Good way not to annoy most viewers, although those who’ll see the ads will be the regulars. Best time/visit ratio.
• Through a post: Just kidding, that annoys me and I don’t want to implement that.

So yeah, I’ve kept very few places where to put them. Your input is wanted, so leave a comment, suggest new places, tell me not to put any ad, you help me decide.

Welcome to the nerdy side of music!

Let there be an intro

This post will be part of a series of articles. Stay tuned for updates.
PART 2 IS NOW HERE

When I was younger and more inexperienced with the Internet and music as a whole, I’d often end up on many p2p clients to find new content to explore. I’ve seen Napster, WinMx, Audiogalaxy, gNutella, eMule, Kazaa (lite, lite++, etc), iMesh, Morpheus, etc. I tried them all through the years, with connections ranging from 56k to DSL, ADSL and cable.

One thing that I did a lot was trying to find the smallest files possible, because it meant faster download, and I could keep more inside my computer. It took me a few years and speakers worth more than $15 to realize that music at 96kbps or even 128kbps was not that great, after all.

First of all, for those who aren’t too tech savvy, let’s define what the bit rate is. To make things simple, a bit rate can tell how much information is read by the computer every second. The higher it is, the best the quality of the song will be. Also, the higher the bit rate, the bigger the file’s size. With this in mind, you know the basics to understand why choosing VBR (Variable bit rate) may be better than CBR (Constant bit rate).

Choosing a bit rate

When downloading music (may it be legal or not), you’re likely to encounter various formats. The most common formats I can get from the top of my head are .mp3, .flac, .aac, .wma, .m4a/.m4p (you crazy iTunes users), .aiff, .wav, .ogg, and sometimes .ape. While they can guide you on the quality of the songs, it’s not everything: mp3 files can go from extremely shitty to high quality, both in CBR and VBR, while formats like .aiff, .flac and .wav are considered lossless and usually present the best quality of all. However, they’re quite heavy files, and a 40 minutes album can easily weight over 250mb.

So what bit rates should be deemed acceptable, or a good compromise between quality and file size? It’s quite hard to say, because it often depends on people’s ears and their audio equipment. It’s evident that low-end speakers and/or a cheap amplifier won’t make high bit rates sound better than others. So just to compare, here are a few real-life references that could help:

• Human voices can usually be understood at under 1kbps, although it can be hard;
• Telephones have a bit rate from 8kbps to 64kbps depending on the technology and model;
• AM radio has an overall bit rate of 32kbps;
• FM radio stands at 96kbps;
• Compact Discs use bit rates ranging up to 1411kbps (1.4mbps).

Voice is usually easier to understand as it is an evolutive trait: it was a good tool for survival to be able to recognize one’s peers, so this can explain why media centered around the voice usually use lower bit rates (ie.: phones and AM radio). When it comes to music, though, sound quality becomes a lot more important due to our training and how music often acts like candy for the brain. The easier, the better.

So to decide what you likely need in music, a few questions and facts can be useful. As an example, if listening to the radio tires your ears after a while, it’s likely too low quality for you. Otherwise, if you can’t find anything to say against it, then you lose nothing by going in lower qualities.

Usually, people will not be too picky about music at 128kbps, although heavier music like Metal will sound more distorted than it was before. 160 kbps is usually enough for most users, but with the advances in mass storage and file transfers, 192kbps has now become the standard for .mp3 files. If 192kbps is not enough, usually, 256kbps or 320kbps will please you, but at the cost of place. There’s even music compressed at 500kbps-1mbps, with the lossless formats mentioned earlier.

So why would I go for VBR if these are fine?

VBR is like eating all the cake and leaving the pork liver on the side of the dish: VBR will usually encompass rates set by the user over a given range. As an example, a VBR file can have bit rates varying through a single song from 96kbps to 320kbps, depending on how much information is going through.

So say I’m listening to The Wall by Pink Floyd. The Happiest Days of our lives (the song with the helicopter coming close) is the intro. When the song starts, the volume is low, there’s not too much instrumentation. No need to have much bits coming through, right? Well indeed, no need. VBR could then reduce the bit rate there to 128kbps (random number).

Then, when The Wall begins, it starts with someone yelling at the top of their lungs, with heavy percussions, bass kicks in. There, a VBR file might have its quality raised up to 256 kbps, so there’s no loss of quality when more is needed. The rest of the song is more or less guitar solos, singing, so you can assume the quality would hover between 168kbps and 320kbps. The last 30 seconds of the song are nothing but the school principal and kids yelling outside. At this part, the quality could drop to the minimum needed, around 96kbps or even 32kbps if you let the file go this low.

That’s not really interesting, until you compare with CBR music: if I want the 256kbps bit rate I need to have no low quality parts during the song, I’d have to have every single part at 256kbps, taking more place than ever needed. Apply this to any song, really.

This is why VBR is pretty much the best format for music around: it’s the best compromise between quality and size.

What are the downsides?

There’s not a lot, really. The most common cases would be compatibility, but mp3 players that can not support VBR music are getting rarer and rarer (unless you’re a fan of .ogg files). It’s also harder to have a live stream of VBR audio over the Internet, due to the nature of changing bit rates. It also takes longer to compress files to a variable bit rate than a constant one. That’s pretty much it.

Conclusion

There’s more to come. I’m going to write more about other aspects of VBR music in following articles (possibly next week). I’m planning on explaining more detailed stuff like VBR v0, VBR v1, VBR v2, etc., how to compress your own VBR files, etc. You can already read more on these sites, if you’re interested:

• http://www.mp3developments.com/article6.php
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000470.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_data_compression

Part 2.

Van der Graaf generator: the large sphere acts as a capacitor to store the charge transferred up its supporting column. The small sphere (connected to the ground potential) will draw an arc from the larger when the air gap breakdown voltage is exceeded

Track list

1. The Hurlyburly
2. Interference Patterns
3. The Final Reel
4. Lifetime
5. Drop Dead
6. Only in a Whisper
7. All That Before
8. Over the Hill
9. (We Are) Not Here

Genre

Progressive rock, art rock

Release

March 17, 2008

Label

Virgin/EMI Records

Background Information

Van Der Graaf Generator is a band from Manchester, England, formed in 1967. While Trisector was released just a few months ago (sorry for not covering it before), the band didn’t keep going on a straight line for 40 years. They stopped playing and producing material in 1972, picked up the instruments again in 1975, and then became inactive again in 1978 until 2005.

They were mainly known for their albums like H to He, Who Am the Only One and Pawn Hearts and with a different line up, the albums Godbluff and Still life were also considered highlights of their career.

The band is characterized by their darker ambiance, relatively rare in progressive music (except maybe for King Crimson). You also can’t mistake them once you’ve heard Peter Hammill’s unique voice, reaching many ranges and able to push inhumane screams as much as regular singing.

Trisector is the band’s second album in this generation (2005 - present), second to Present. Since then, they’ve gone with a more improvised sound, something they wouldn’t try as much in their old releases. Their sound changed. It’s not like they had a choice, without saxophones nor violins.

My Opinion

The Hurlyburly opens the disc slowly, with a few special effects and noodling, as if the band was preparing. It takes about 1 minute before VDGG are ready and start the song for real. The instrumentation is tightly wound, but the whole thing just reminds me of some songs from the 80s I always had trouble to digest. It’s not bad, and if you liked the 80s rock, you could easily get into that track.

Interference pattern has got a more mechanical feel to it, reminding in structure (not really in sound) of songs like Discipline by King Crimson. Not exactly surprising since Robert Fripp used to do some appearances on their past albums. It’s nothing special, though.

The final Reel and Only In a Whisper bring the band closer to their origins, with some slower music, slowly building to a melody with a lot of tension in it. Peter Hammill also proves he hasn’t lost his voice with age, something singers like Ian Anderson couldn’t do.

A few of the following tracks seem to place Van Der Graaf Generator as stuck between their original 70s and the 80s. Drop Dead has to be the perfect example of this. It’s the normal 80s rock song, not exactly what you’d be expecting from VDGG. I think the worst offender in this aspect is All that Before, which sounds like some kind of remake of You Really Got Me by Van Halen

Luckily, the album ends positively with Over the Hill and (We Are) Not Here. They’re more akin to the normal Van Der Graaf generator in how it sounds. Don’t get me wrong though, you can’t easily confuse this album with older ones.

Conclusion

This album doesn’t beat Godbluff, or Pawn Hearts, and the lineup made it their first release without the Sax. All in all, it’s not their best work, but not their worst either. I’d say this album is more for collectors and fans than the casual person who wants to discover Van der Graaf Generator. Go with Godbluff, Pawn Hearts, Still Life or H to He, Who Am the Only One to do that.

Link in Comments

I need the best quality in the world to get all the juice out of my 128 kbps torrented mp3 files!

There’s plenty of absurdly ridiculous equipment aimed at audiophiles who ‘feel’ their ears can outpass the natural capacities they have. Most audiophile marketing strategies tap-dance on the line where science and ignorance meet. Hardcore audiophiles get stuck in-between placebo effects, pseudo-science, dubious claims and a lack of understanding of the human body. They also have a fat wallet, so this means a lot of costly useless shit is targeted to them.

One of the biggest enemies of audiophiles are EMI and RFI. Both are pretty much the same: it’s an electromagnetic radiation from an external source that influences how electrical circuits work. It will often affect the good signals from AM radio, to a lesser extent FM radio, and devices like a cellphone. Small effects can be heard in other devices; some guitar pickups will capt the signals from a TV remote being used nearby, although this would depend on the pickups and remote themselves.

Devices with integrated circuits (like computers, TV, monitors, etc.) are more likely to be sources of EMI and RFI than receptors. Real ways to protect one’s device against electromagnetic radiation are usually things like Faraday Cages or shielded cables.

There are other things audiophiles want to block out, like the disgusting solid-state amps, or mostly anything that is not themselves. Let’s just skip through it and get to the cool devices they have to help themselves.

Beating laws of physics at their own game

Some products offered will give this subtitle all its meaning. First, let me show some of them:

The Marigo Labs Signature 3-D Mat
This is a small mat to put on a disk, inside a CD player, for $200. The review claims some major differences in sound quality after application, like changing the reverberation feeling of the songs listened, adding ‘mass and weight’ to the music (better bass and percussions), better sounding triangle (the instrument), better highs and more overall quality to the sound. The site also claims it helps DVDs having a better image.

The claims made about the Mat are about the EMI and RFI, with the pretension that the bits of woven silver within the thing, when spinning fast, act like a shield (possibly some kind of aforementioned Faraday Cage?). Except it would only protect one side of the disc, would act in no way on any other piece of equipment and there’s only doubt to be had about EMI and RFI causing a real interference with the red lasers used in CD players.

The Shakti Hallograph
They’re pieces of wood on a stick used in pairs that are supposed to make your room a better place for music. The manufacturer pretends this makes the bass better, lets the speakers be heard at their full potential and whatnot. And all of this for $999 a pair!

News: They are pieces of wood. Changing the position of a chair or where YOU stand in a room will have a bigger effect on the music. We’re not talking of putting carpet on your walls, which would absorb sound and have some effect, but of putting some kind of fake candlestick in the corners of your room to enhance the sound. There’s not even more explaining needed, and I cry for the people who apparently bought it. But there’s even worse, coming from the same kind of audiophiles:

Acoustic System Resonators
Here’s how it works according to the review:

To recap, the Acoustic System resonators get excited by acoustic waves in the room. They sympathetically resonate at specific frequencies and thus add their output to the sonic event. This adds new direct sound sources to those represented by the loudspeakers and their early reflections[...] The listener’s brain is tricked to experience the room rather differently than without the resonators. These tiny cups with their high pitch trigger our attention in a subtle way. It seems that in place of the resonator, there is something more. More space?

$2380 for the best models. Nothing more to say. The above photo shows a display of many of them. They’re supposed to resonate with the music and add to the overall feeling. I can only scratch my head trying to understand how anyone could want this, especially given the price.

Speaker wires

Speaker wires are an absolute can of worms. Outrageous prices can be asked for a piece of metal which somehow makes electrical current travel better under some conditions, like when they don’t touch the ground: This is where the Cradles of Silence kick in. Apparently, electrical current and sound quality is affected by how the wires are touching the ground and picking up its vibrations. Never mind the fact air also vibrates, the fact that the speakers and the amplifier themselves are touching the ground.

The cradles of silence are wrong on so many levels. Walking on a floor will create more sound to your ear than what any wire will pick up. There is also the fact that vibration may as well propagate better in a suspended wire than when it’s just laying flat on the ground. The saddest thing is that, according to the website, they’re sold out.

In fact, there’s still worst than that. Misconceptions about wires are so bad some people manage to sell wires for $7250, or even $43000. Welcome the Anjou speaker cables and the Opus MM SC. The picture on the lower right is the Transparent Cables Opus MM SC price list taken from the .pdf file on their website.

What these cables can try to do can be done as efficiently for way lower prices: insulation is covered by the shielded cables mentioned earlier, and then the different factors that influence sound quality are not really relevant to the price.

The main physical aspect helping a wire sending a good signal is the resistance. To make things simple, the lower the resistance, the better the signal from the amplifier. The shorter the cable, the lower the resistance. The bigger the gauge, the lower the resistance (and the loss of signal over distance). Speakers are low-impedance devices. The lower the impedance, the more important the resistance is. Simple enough? You need low resistance for better sound, and the other factors are mostly unimportant in comparison, and usually only take effect under unusual lengths or conditions.

Normal cheap speaker cables are good for that. This is where most audiophiles will argue. What THEY hear is not what science says.

That’s the beauty of double-blind tests: the idea is to take a bunch of people, have them sitting in a room, and make them listen to the same song twice, but with different equipment (or lying about the equipment used), without them knowing. You then ask them to say if there’s any difference and if they can spot which is the hi-tech audiophile equipment and which one is the normal wire. Usually, double-blind tests reveal roughly 50-50 ratios. This means people can not make the difference.

To prove this point, The Consumerist reported a home experiment where 12 audiophiles could not make the difference between high-end Monster cables and a coat hanger in terms of audio quality.

More reading

Back in 1999, the New York Times published an article about how high-end speaker wires are bullshit:

Mr. Dunlavy has often gathered audio critics in his Colorado Springs lab for a demonstration.

“What we do is kind of dirty and stinky,” he said. ”We say we are starting with a 12 WAG zip cord, and we position a technician behind each speaker to change the cables out.”

The technicians hold up fancy-looking cables before they disappear behind the speakers. The critics debate the sound characteristics of each wire.

“They describe huge changes and they say, ‘Oh my God, John, tell me you can hear that difference,’ ” Mr. Dunlavy said. The trick is the technicians never actually change the cables, he said, adding, “It’s the placebo effect.”

If you really feel like investing in audio equipment, by God, do it on real hardware, like the amplifier and the speakers themselves rather than tweaks and investing on non-essential equipment.

That baby is amazed because there is a post on this very blog. The open mouth represents surprise, and it’s also kind of disgusting. It could also make me look like a kind of weird fetishist to post mouths as update images twice in a row.

Explain yourself, young man!

I feel like I have to explain a bit why the blog went kind of dead all of a sudden. The reason is pretty simple: I had some other stuff to do and didn’t feel like updating too much. My internship just finished last week, I got a new bass, and gave myself a lot of stress about the projects I was doing at work, which led me to a certain lack of time and motivation to listen to music and review it.

Unfortunately, this week is not going to be better. I’ve got practices for a show, a show (in fact 2), a show that doesn’t have me performing in it, some appointments, etc. So, next week? Yes, hopefully! I still don’t know what I’m going to review. I’ve got some Gryphon and Premiata Forneria Marconi that’s been laying around for a while and that I wanted people to discover. I also have some stuff being prepared about ridiculous audiophile equipment, if that’s interesting.

Lately, I’ve been trying to move a bit away from just reviews (which gave birth to posts like Phil Collins Sucks), but I have no idea what you regular readers like the most, so just give a few comments, it could guide me. It’s not like I like doing one more than the other, I still have some fun doing so. Keep visiting (or subscribe to the RSS feed) for more news!

Avril Lavigne’s mouth is full of cheating and trickery as her voice gets remastered way too much sometimes.

I found a really neat article about auto-tuning abuse in pop music.

If you’re unfamiliar with Auto-tune, and especially if you listen to much pop and rock, you might not hear it initially. When overdone, the effect yields an unnatural yodel or warble in a singer’s voice. But the sound is so commonplace in modern mainstream music that your ears may have tuned out the auto-tune!

The auto-tune effect, to help you out, is often called the ‘Cher effect’. If you listen to ween, the song spirit walker (you can hear a preview here) is also a good example of over the top abuse.

As a rule of thumb, auto-tune can be a good way to fix one or two notes, but in the recent years, producers started using it more and more as a way to either save time, or to just use it as style. All in all, it can sometimes give pretty bad results. Hope you enjoy the above linked post.

Here’s the link again if your attention span is really bad.

This article is not meant to be serious. Please Phil Collins, do not come here and try to burn my house the way you burnt down the Genesis House :(

The Idea

A few months ago, I began reading This is your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin, and I got interested by a few facts about music, how the brain works and whatnot. Here’s a snippet from the book that I found interesting:

All the available evidence is that music can’t be merely auditory cheesecake; it has been around a very long time in our species. Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. The Slovenian bone flute, dated at fifty thousand years ago, which was made from the femur of a now-extinct European bear, is a prime example. Music predates agriculture in the history of our species. We can say conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music. In fact, the physical evidence suggests the contrary.

Music is no doubt older than the fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute, because flutes were unlikely the first instruments. Various percussion instruments, including drums, shakers, and rattles were likely to have been in use for thousand of years before flutes [...]. The archaeological record shows an uninterrupted record of music making everywhere we find humans, and in every era. And, of course, singing most probably predates flutes as well.

I re-read this bit yesterday and thought that drums didn’t evolve that much in concept all in all, especially not when compared to instruments like the Piano (or the synthesizer) or the the electric guitar. Well, it did try to evolve in the 80’s, but it then turned to a murderous MIDI monster. If anything else from the percussive world had to be the target of slow evolution, it was Phil Collins.

Prehistoric men were awesome, Phil Collins sucks

• Studies have proven that women at their peak of fertility during their menstrual cycle tend to rate poor, but creative men as their best mate choice for a short-term relationship, while this couldn’t be said of other times during the cycles. This is a sign of musicianship being a useful skill in survival of one’s genes through times.
• Phil Collins managed to have kids so maybe this means something.

• Most savage music is crude and to us disagreeable, and anyone could do it, in any society.
• Phil Collins can play and sing at the same time, it’s not anyone who can do it. The rest is still true.

• Primitive percussionists used a stretched head of skin over a hollow bowl or box.
• Phil Collins’ used percussionist head is stretched skin over a hollow bowl or box.

• Some believers think cavemen didn’t really exist and would rather trust the good old Genesis.
• Some believers think Collins shouldn’t really exist and would rather listen to the good old Genesis.

• Prehistoric men were bad ass, and would hunt and kill animals to eat them around a fire while playing their drums.
• Phil Collins donated autographed drumsticks to fight against KFC.

• In every past society that we are aware of, music and dance are inseparable.
• Phil Collins can’t dance, he can’t talk, he can’t sing, only thing about him is the way he walks.

• Through history, music was used in courtship as a way to prove one’s wealth, intelligence, stamina and overall good health.
• Phil Collins has used music in courtship as a way to prove his own wealth, stamina and overall good health.

Do you hate Phil Collins too?

I usually hate this crap, but this one lends itself pretty well for the article: shitty quiz. For the kick of it, here were the results:

Congratulations! You hate Phil Collins. You blame him for every mishap that occurs during your everyday life, and with good reason! Pat yourself on the back, you’re a good person.

68% of people had this result.

Can’t say I’m surprised.

Those are the blue men from the Blue Man Group, surprisingly not having the plural form of ‘man’ in the band name.

Track list

1. Above
2. Time to Start
3. Sing Along
4. Up to the Roof
5. Your Attention
6. Persona
7. Piano Smasher
8. White Rabbit
9. The Current
10. Shadows, Pt. 2
11. What Is Rock
12. The Complex
13. I Feel Love
14. Exhibit 13

Genre

Experimental rock

Release

April 22, 2003

Label

Lava/Atlantic

Background Information

The Blue man group has to be one of the most known experimental groups around in pop culture. Part of it is certainly because their experimental side is more oriented on the instrumentation than on the composition. This permits them to make really accessible music, often with a new sound, and if you have the chance to see them live, a surprising vision. Indeed, their instruments made out of PVC often impress, like the current photo shows.

I will also just add this youtube video about their song Sing Along with Dave Matthews to describe them.

My Opinion

The Blue Man group use most of their custom made instruments to percussive purposes, backing up a more pop-like music. Above introduces the album in a similar manner, being highly rhythmic over anything. The piece gets more and more intense as a prelude to the intro song Time to Start which introduces the concepts of Rock Concert Movements, around wich the album’s tour is based.

In my opinion, the narrative voice is well suited for a live show, but it’s out if its element on the disc version. Not too bad, because Sing Along (with dave Matthews) follows, and I must say that it’s one of the best tracks on there (it’s also why I chose it as the previously linked video). The PVC instruments (as well as boat antennas) are sounding much better in this arrangement in terms of ambiance and general feeling.

There are many other collaborations on the album, namely Up to the Roof, featuring Tracy Bonham, Persona with Josh Haden, White Rabbit ft. Esthero, I feel love supported by Venus Hum, The Current with Gavin Rossdale, Shadows, Pt. 2 (where the hell is Pt. 1?) with Rob Swift and Tracy Bonham. Finally, there’s What is Rock featuring Peter Moore and Arone Dyer, the former also participating in The Complex. I will admit not knowing a single of these names. That’s not a big problem, because it sincerely takes nothing away from the album to my foreigner ear. Good News.

I do believe that the Blue Man Group must be seen live over being listened (a lot of their concepts are more entertaining and impressive when seen), but the invited artists permit the album to gain in diversity so you don’t need all the visuals to still enjoy it.

Piano Smasher is an interesting piece based around the instrument that bears the same name.

The Piano Smasher is a piano stripped down to its frame and stood up on its side. It is played by hitting the strings with a large soft mallet, resulting in a clangy, almost discordant sound. In live performances, this instrument is generally played with a MIDI system, using sensors behind the strings, as the instrument goes out of tune very quickly. Each Piano Smasher is tuned to only one note, as it would be otherwise impossible to get anything resembling a musical tone from the instrument. (source)

The track is filled with soulless percussions spiced up with Piano Smasher hits, and that’s about it for the song. Interesting nonetheless.

The Current Is almost completely at the opposite of Piano Smasher, really more intense. The same kind of intensity stays until the end with compositions like What is Rock.

Conclusion

The Complex is a good effort from the Blue Man Group. I feel I could get tired of it fast enough, but it’s worth a listening once in a while. The inventive capacities they use live are transported relatively well to this recording, and I’ll finish this review by saying that it’s certainly worth a try.

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