Blog Moving

Well, being the restless soul that I am, I think I've decided to move my blog over to Wordpress. No bad blood Google but you do make me nervous.

http://perhapsmusic.wordpress.com

So please update your RSS readers, bookmarks, brain cells, tattoos, stickers, and whatever other methods you use for keeping track of things.

If Wordpress irritates me too much, I'll more than likely be coming back here, unless of course I find a better substitute.

Lack of updates.

Yes, I am still alive. Yes, I am still updating the blog. No, I'm not very consistent. (: I have a couple of albums in line that I'm planning to write up soon, so stay tuned for those. I really need to get in the habit of posting at least every other week, and at the very minimum monthly. This being said, I also wanted to open up the floor for anyone, even first time viewers, to feel free to send me requests for album reviews. Heard about an album? Want to know a bit about it? Send me an e-mail. Independent artists, want someone to plug your album? Send me an e-mail. One thing I definitely can respect is independent artists who are free from a lot of the corporate factory that squeezes out the same crap over and over again (cynical rant coming).

So look forward to some new bloggage, hopefully I can regain some motivation here.

Here's a snippet of one of the next albums I'll be reviewing, which is the album, "Sanctuary" by a band called Magna Canta. As it says on the album cover, "Gregorian Chants, electronica wizardry & mystical rhythms. Close your eyes... listen to Sanctuary." Good advice I think.

New Grading System

So as I tend to get ahead of myself I pointed out in my most recent review that I've created a new rating system for the albums. The system will (for now) consist of five basic categorical grades: listenability, relistenability, listening experience, variation, and overall grade. Is this obscure? Well.. it's not meant to be obscure but I'll lay out precisely what I mean here in this post.

Listenability

Yes, listenability is in fact a word:

Listenability (Noun): Being such that listening is pleasurable lis'ten·a·bil'i·ty n.

Yes, listenability is exactly what it sounds like, as many of the older generation might encounter when listen to the "new fangled banging on pots and pans music" that they're offspring enjoy so much, listenability is a very subjective thing (keep that in mind). I try to review in terms of very general listenability, there tend to be certain elements of bands that are just horrendous to listen to (i.e. for me high pitched screaming, poor studio equalizer work (the high end needs to be brought in guys..)) It's probably unlikely that the listenability grade will really vary much from each of my reviews (Disclaimer: I only tend to review albums I would actually recommend, I don't review just anything unless requested). So how well.. easy is it to listen to it? That's what listenability is.. basically.. I know it might seem a little obscure, but I hope you understand. (:

Relistenability

Now this is not particularly a word (at least it's not in the dictionary) I just prefixified it (the meaning should be obvious). I'm truly a believer that some albums exponentially decrease in listening pleasure the more times you listen to it. Relistenability attempts to gauge the "play it again" factor with various albums, that is will you enjoy listening to it the 100th time you play it, or just the first few times? Relistenability is exactly what that is all about.

Listening Experience

Once again we delve into the more obscure and subjective arenas of my rating system. I do hope you'll forgive me I'm a very obscure guy (: Listening experience has a lot to do with the overall "feel" of the album. Am I sitting there thinking about what I should make for dinner that night? Am I feeling like this album really makes me want to jam a pencil into my brain? Or does the music allow my mind to kind of clear and focus in on the sounds providing a more relaxing or exciting or insert emotion here feeling? If it does allow me to focus into the album, then the listening experience is good, if I'm able to almost completely ignore the music the listening experience might not be very high.. (or you have some awesome tuning out skills) Did I listening to the album? Did I feel like I was forcing myself to listen to the album? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself when attempting to place a listening experience rating on the album.

Variation

Once again, I hope this is fairly straight forward for you. Variation deals more with "Do the tracks all sound the same?" than anything else, when I'm providing a rating. Some bands suffer from cloneitis when they are writing tracks. Each track sounds almost the same as all the other tracks, how much did they mix it up? That's what I attempt to gauge in variation. Now keep in mind most bands exhibit a certain "style" variation is not gauging this I would include a complete explanation at the beginning of the album review if the band had changed its core style. I speak more of interalbum variation. How much do the tracks sound alike? Could I tell one track from another one? That's what variation attempts to gauge.

Overall

Okay, this really should be the least obscure one of them all. (: This is merely a culmination of all the rating things (expressed here and ones that I haven't expressed) put together into one averaged grade. Keep in mind there are no mathematical calculations taking place with the overall grade. I do not precisely average the gradings of the other categories, this is just a one shot take everything into account, lay all the cards on the table, kind of grading thing. It takes into account not only the grading categories I have expounded on here, but more obscure grading critera that flow in my disorganized brain.

So, I hope this has been educational for you, I don't mean to be obscure, but it's hard for me to put things so simply when rating music. I just want to give you as verbose a rating as I can when grading something as a new music album. I love music, and I hope I can point you to some new stuff. Cheers.

Embedded Music Tracks

So, I've been meandering around the interwebs trying to find a decent way to give you a taste of the albums I'm reviewing. I am going to be TESTING multiple "music service" websites, such as IMEEM, Last.fm, Seeqpod, and so on. At the moment I'm using IMEEM (even though I prefer the interface and embedding characteristics of Seeqpod more) since I was able to FIND tracks on all the albums I've reviewed so far. If anyone finds any SLOW loading (which is the primary thing I'm worried about with embedding tracks) please let me know via perhapsmusic at gmail. Also, if you have any recommendations for other third party websites that allow embedding of music tracks feel free to let me know. Also, I have a few ideas for a couple of albums I want to review, so keep an eye out for those in the coming weeks. Cheers.