My weirdest CD

Over the years, I have gotten into what I consider weirder and weirder music. I've always had some idea what the weirdest CD in my collection was. This post has a lot of links to music in it; I recommend headphones for most of it, or you'll miss what's going on.

First, back in about 1991, I had bought mostly stuff like Best of Blondie, a bunch (but not all yet) of the Moody Blues Albums, and other assorted rock. Always stuff that leaned toward atmospherics. My weirdest CD then was Yello - One Second. This is quite a good CD, and I still like to listen to it occasionally. It's electronic music, often with a latin vibe to it.

Around 1995, a friend of mine (Maynard!) sent me a tape of Orbital - Snivilization. I was not into Techno yet, and it took me quite a few listens to get into this. Maynard warned me about it; he said, "This will sound really repetitive. But the music is in a different place than you're used to finding it." So I gave it a chance. I listened to it, and wasn't impressed or repulsed. So I kept trying. Maybe on the 30th time through it, in the car (my wife's Accord, near the U of Iowa Dental Building), Science Friction caught my ear, and so began my deeper journey into electronic music.

Later, around 1997, it was The Orb - Orbvs Terrarvm. This is a sprawling epic of Ambient Techno with very strange textures and very slowly-changing soundscapes. I'm lucky to have found this; my wife found it in a record store on the listening stand (I think Orblivion had just been released), and bought it for me because she thought I'd like it. That's probably based on my liking of Enigma - MCMXC a.d..

During the coming years, I became aware that such a thing as "Zero-Beat Ambient" existed. I've always been interested in rhythm, having grown up on Henry Mancini music, so I assumed I would never like such a thing.

Then I came across Biosphere. I was browsing someone's shared iTunes directory at work (Acclaim Cheltenham), looking at genres. I saw something labelled "Dream." I wondered what that would sound like, and I loved it. I managed to get this file from him the day Acclaim shut down. Ordinarily I buy all my music to support the artists, but this one is unavailable. So I'm lucky I narfed the file.

I came to find out this was a remix of a track from an early masterpiece of Ambient Techno, 1991's Microgravity. Orbital (soon to become masters of the genre) was still recording on cassette tapes at the time. So I got a legit copy of Microgravity because it had been reissued. Reading up on the artist, I found out he is responsible for Substrata, one of the finest pure Ambient albums of the 90s. It is entirely beatless, with only the tiniest hints of percussion in one or two tracks.

On Microgravity was CloudWalker II, a beatless track. It's quite cool. This along with the very atmospheric vibe on the album convinced me that if anyone could make a beatless album I would like, it was Biosphere.

So I got Substrata, which promptly became the weirdest CD in my collection. Here's a sample.

So, I started hunting for other such music. My quest led me to SomaFM's Drone Zone, where they play quiet, droning music all day every day. Suddenly, this came on. Well, I guess suddenly isn't really the right word! Having already learned that the music can be in a place you're not looking for it, I was able to look past the almost featureless nature of this and appreciate the quality of the soundscape.

Waveform Transmission v1.0 - v1.9 is now the weirdest CD in my collection. While Substrata was beatless, it still had lots of rhythmic structure. v1.0 - v1.9 is just a series of soundscapes, almost (but not quite) entirely devoid of rhythmic detail. I've listened to this disc many, many times now, and I have come to like all of it (though some more than others) except v1.7, which is just a muffled recording of voices garbled in transmission. The liner notes mention paranormal activity and other odd things, so I suspect this is supposed to be a recording of the dead or some such.

The depth and width of the sounds on this disc are incredible. The murky darkness of its atmosphere appeal to me, as I've always liked music further from the light.

Around the time I found this, I had gotten into the 4-disc set of Gas (Nah und Fern) through Amazon's You-Might-Like-This service. Though Gas often uses beats, it's still pretty minimal.

All this has made me more sensitive to the texturing in more rhythmic music. This led me to get Monolake's heaviest album, Momentum. Here's a sample. My favorite on this disc is Reminiscence, but it's not as heavy, so I had to put in two links here.

There's no way to end this blog post since my trip through music is not yet finished, so I'll just sign off now.

Creationists and bug-zappers

I wonder why creationists are drawn to Science like flies to bug-zappers. They're desperate to give their opinions legitimacy with a tool that is anathema to their goal. I'm talking specifically about organizations such as The Discovery Institute.

I think I'll start calling this "Science Envy". Science works because of its requirement that accepted results are reproducible. If the psychics, dowsers, creationists, or whatever could co-opt that power, they could make so much progress in spreading their ideas.

So you get quantum-mechanical babble in sales pitches for useless bracelets. "Clinical trials prove..." in ads for useless medicinal products. They want desperately to have that power Science confers: "This works, and we know it works because it has been verified by Science!"

But ultimately, they fail because of Science's built-in self-correction mechanism - the requirement that claims (even long-accepted claims) must stand up to continued subsequent testing. This means it cannot be used to promulgate just anything; only things that work on a long-term basis.

By "ultimately fail," I mean over the course of decades or centuries. The charlatans and deluded may get temporary traction in the course of a lifetime, but over time, repeated failures to duplicate a claim relegates that claim to history.

But what about the early Greeks who thought maybe the earth went around the Sun? It was centuries before that correct result came back. The point is, it did come back, because Science continually questions itself. When experimental results started to make the Geocentric theory look too complex compared to the Heliocentric model, people started looking at the Heliocentric one again. Earlier, we just didn't have the data to support the Heliocentric model.

This does raise the issue of how we tell which theories today are correct but unverifiable, and which are just wrong. The point is, it doesn't matter. Keep testing those theories, and it will all get sorted out. The sieve of reproducibility of results is what separates us from hundreds of thousands of crackpot ideas. Sure, we filter out some correct results that we will have to rediscover. But this is a small price to pay for avoiding all of the garbage, like homeopathy, dowsing, and faith healing.

So go ahead and envy our Science. Just don't be surprised when the very thing you are trying to use turns against your theories. Science is beholden to nobody.