language & terminology of experimental sound?

[Bloated Slutbag]

And the skilled writer will still be able to pull off meaningful metaphors and truly make the reader understand what he/she means.

This is a wonderful ideal to aspire to, but the skilled writer is as hard to come by as the skilled sound-maker. Put the two together and they add up to a statistical improbability that you'll find a review you genuinely need. Now add to that peer intimidation, eg "heh, you ain't no Seymour Glass", and we get the current state of affairs. A massive glut of product with little more than press releases to go by. (Forums like these with advanced search functions help plenty, but we're far from the ideals abovementioned.) For every worthwhile effort covered in your SI, ALAP, or NS, there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of arse-destroying efforts that disappear into the truly unreadable realm of PR land. We don't need more writers. We need more hardcore fans willing to write.

EDITed for arse-destroying

[Bloated Slutbag]

From my understanding, Soddy's rating system is an argument. The argument goes like this: noise matters. Noise matters because someone takes it seriously. It follows that the more people take it seriously the less the argument need be voiced.

Getting back to Senior FreakAnimal's original point...

The rating system may also serve as a critique of language. The critique goes like this: words fail. Words fail because they mean different things to different people. Take the word "harsh". One harsh headed colleague contends that a good militant wall deserves the harsh tag because it "sounds like the speakers are being ripped apart". Not to be harsh, but let's be honest. If the damage to the ear is conspicuously less need the word harsh even apply? As long as words are applied subjectively - not that we have any alternative - they will fail.

Even when words succeed, the value of that success may be subjectively applied. An esteemed critic reports that a particular artist "seems surprised by and continually impressed with whatever noises spew forth, without regard for editing or, better yet, the garbage can. That passages here or there...are quite engaging is not the point - that they're surrounded by trite, unimaginative knob twiddling with no regard for form, dynamics, composition or improvisational reaction is what irks me." In other words, worthy of at least an "8" for Rawness, as applied to methodology. What irks one person may well blow the other away, even if (at least) two meanings of "blown away" are forced into the same frame.

Intrestingly, a Soddyesque "supplementary rating system" currently enjoys use among contributors to the Blood Ties webzine, although only a single score is alloted for sound:

Overall Rating
Composition
Sounds
Production Quality
Concept
Packaging

They even have the "audacity" to rate concept. (Hey bro, maybe you didn't get it?) Still, a systematic approach has its uses. Especially when you want to tell the critic to go fuck himself.

[Bloated Slutbag]

I wouldn't be averse to more rating systems being put into practice. Not as means of evaluating how good things are, but as means of evaluating how cleanly they cleave to certain standards or expectations, be they HN, pe, darkambient, whatever. Note that this is an issue for the listener (or critic), not the sound-purveyor. Sound-purveyors will do what they do. They may feel compelled to respond to the critical audience - for instance, by attempting to reject everything that audience apparently stands for; or by trying really hard to please the audience. They may choose to ignore their audience completely. It's the listener-critic's job to decide what sounds like what, whether it's worthy of repeat listen, if it should be scored, etc.

Practical application?

A rating system could be effective when used to mark one's territory, be that the critic's own or that of the perceived wider audience. Scores may put critical expectations up front, and may help the reader filter out reviews that offer no apparent basis, or base-line, for evaluation. Before he gave up on noise completely, relegating Vital Weekly's noise reviews to jliat, Franz de Waard was actually quite good at helping the reader filter expectations. He'd open each noise review by openly stating that he thought noise was all a pile of derivative crap. But few reviewers do that, and will often assume the reader is with them as they slowly unfurl their banner of ignorance. Nope.

Ratings are most effective when they try to serve a descriptive functionn. Senior FreakAnimal astutely observes that Soddymized Scoring serves not to value so much as describe. Theoretically, a piece of HN may score all tens but yield a negative review. And (theoretically) vice versa.   

Here's an old Mr Blumpy (Soddy) review whose scores clearly reflect how far outside (Soddy's understanding of) the HN confines Astro occasionally strays. It seems pretty clear, however, that the reviewer quite enjoyed the shit.

Now, this is a fucking gorgeous bit of sound. Astro`s quietest outing yet, but rich, beautiful, deeply haunting, icy-smooth, shimmering psychedelia.
The crystalline, analog-synth, permutations meet expectations sound-wise, but exceed them in terms of quality. Looks good too, housed in this cool, black, wood box; a cute little fetish objet to go with your Merzbox.
Back to sound. Bell-like drones tremble and tumble into circular, ringing, squeegee, and lavish, deep-sea, quiver. Cascading chimes, scintillating starbursts, cavernous whispers. Leisurely builds and sighs, waves cresting and plummeting ever downward, reverberant upward sweeps, sparkling, glittering flow. Echoes of Stimbox in the pacing, deliciously sexy sweetness sucking the listener into an enchanting, aromatic, viscosity. Warm wet wispy waterlogged wavering washes whet the porn palette as luscious lubricated tongues elongate and lick lazily at gaseous baby-pucker harmonics, luxurious, strawberry-frosted sophistication and style.

Harshness 0.0
Density 6.9
Rawness 0.0
Craftsmanship 9.3
SSpasticity 0.0
Harmonicaness 8.9

Scores need not be mutually exclusive. In another review Soddy notes that "a frequent and natural consequence of high grade spasmic flirtation" is "a lower grade harmonicaness". Which may go without saying. The more spastic species of HN can hardly be expected to lull the listener into a blissful, ethereal, oblivion of leisurely, overlapping, drift... though I suppose one's mileage will vary. Again, it's not a matter of good or bad but of what is (theoretically) expected.

A word on context. Here in Japan, the Bloated Slutbag boys often use words like "lovely" and "beautiful" to describe work that others may dub "harsh" and "brutal". It depends on context, levels of sobriety notwithstanding . But, to paraphrase bitewerks, without context, without knowing the person behind the words, those words can objectively mean anything. That is to say, objectively they mean fuck all.

Words need to be contextualized. Sorry, but the notion of a perfect "honesty" which clarifies and crystallizes everything is a hard sell. And at this stage, I'm not buying.

Bring on the rating systems.

[Bloated Slutbag]

Sorry to keep ranting on. Mr Brain hasn't been operating at peak effeciency, and it seems, as ever after the fact, that I have some explaining to do. More on "words need to be contextualized".


As a reader, the degree of disbelief I'm willing to suspend when approaching a review depends on how well I think I know the reviewer. If it's written by someone I don't know, that reviewer may gain my trust with the tried and true practice of refering knowledgably to comparable work in the field - benchmark releases, previous tapes by same artist, etc. Knowledge comes with the territory; knowing more than the reader about one's subject is part of a writer's "skill set". But without writing like a name-dropping poseur, the writer may also attract and sustain my interest by demonstrating their literary skills.

Nevertheless, as a fan, both literary skills and name-dropping are seldom sufficient, especially if the writer says something "interesting" - eg something that goes against my expectations. My default response can be summarized thusly:

"Who is this fuck?"

And so begins a brief spell of netstalking, whereby I try to ascertain where this person is coming from - eg reading her other reviews, following links to apparent associates, etc. Oftentimes, revelations can be disappointing, and the frustration at having wasted my precious time - yet again - mounts.

This is not really an issue for zines like SI. By publishing the review SI confers its stamp of reliability. But zines like SI, ALAP, SI... taken altogether, they represent less than 1% of my review-reading. The other 99+% have a mountain of skepticism to overcome, and no amount of "being literate" can surmount the ever mounting layers of... cynicism, skepticism, frustration. And frankly, if I may wax cynical, good writership often goes hand in hand with TOTAL IGNORANCE of the shit I know and love.