Savant's ISM Is Simply Magnificent

FUNNY ACRONYMS!

But seriously, I love ISM. Run to YouTube, or the Pirate Bay, or, you know, spend money or something. I'm not exactly sure how that works. Something about credit cards? Here, I'll even embed a video in this post, you lazy bastards!

I guess I have to review this now to fill my obligatory sycophantic rambling quota. Ahem. Savant's ISM is the second best electronic music album I've heard in 2012, which is a truly meaningless statistic as I am by no means an expert on electronic music. In fact I hardly listen to the genre at all, considering I come from the much more analog medium of rock and metal. The simple fact that I bothered to listen through the entire album says a lot about Savant's abilities as a composer.

The album is almost entirely devoid of any of the cringe-worthy moments of lazy songwriting in electronic music such as looping unremarkable melodies, relying on effects over substance (a major hurdle most dubstep artists fail to clear when applying their characteristic distorted and envelope-filtered sound to a bass line) or including uninteresting and clichéd chord progressions, rhythms and melodies in their songs. If anything, he mostly does the contrary: longer melodies akin to some genres of rock, using amazing effects to complement the great music, and occasionally mocking or referencing the classic chiptune sound before adding his touch to it. I can thoroughly enjoy ISM the whole way through, something I rarely experience in electronic genres.

It does more than simply "not fail" though: it excels with its driving glitch-hop or groovy rhythms and oldschool chiptune-influenced melodies. It also successfully crosses the boundaries of many electronic genres, including the ones I previous mentioned, along with some nu disco and electronica. As a musician, I'm also a huge fan of the sound of this album. It's a solidly mixed and well produced album, but that's nothing compared to his use of flanging, the glitch-hop standard of lightning-fast sampling and cuts and the tone of the different bass and lead sounds he incorporates into the music. It all makes me want to figure out each individual sound and find ways to emulate it in an analog format. ISM's sound really adds another dimension to the album on top of simple enjoyment of the good songwriting.

I don't feel it's necessary to go through each song in great detail, but of particular interest is the 8-bit chiptune sound in Prelude, Starfish and Ism (among others), the funky hyper-edited vocals in Cry For Love and its groovy bass line, and the cool tremolo effect in Mystery.

Now go enjoy some great music!

A First Post

!!!1!!!`!!~!!

Okay now that I've got that one out of my system I should probably act like a civilized human being. The first step being writing"civilised" properly, regardless of what Google thinks is correct spelling. Time to start talking about, you know, a topic, I guess? Why don't I start with starting things, like this first post. Starting is hard. For example, I have just stopped caring about forming sophisticated and/or intelligent sentences because I've been staring at a blank page for a quite a while now. I started this blog on the 18th with the intention of immediately starting to write posts. It is now the 23rd.

A key step in the process of starting things, as I may have just hinted at, is the art of not giving a shit. This is incredibly counter-intuitive, as pretty much from day one parents, teachers, government officials and professionals advise people to give more shits, i.e. "Youngsters should really give more of a shit about politics" or "Son (and(?)/or daughter), you should give more of a shit about your grades at school!" However this argument misses the point of putting effort into something entirely. Being concerned about the effects of effort is not the main driving force of it. Motivation, involvement, taking pride in effort and not caring what others think about some form of "work" will result in its completion. Being concerned, fearful or feeling obligated only works in cases where choice is limited: you have to get through high school (and almost certainly university) if you want to get anywhere in life, according to the tradition view on education which, for many cases, is true, although for others this argument fails. When there's no obligation however, like in writing music or writing this post, this attitude is crippling. I don't need to write this, so why "waste" the effort and run the risk of failure or humiliation? Much better writers will almost definitely laugh at my style. So fuck it, I'm going write anyway.

Therein lies the key (I can't tell if that's horribly cliché or good style, so whatever, I'll just roll with it) to just doing...anything not strictly mandatory. More than the minimum. Holy Spirit of the unedited Star Wars Trilogy, I'm at the third paragraph! So by now I've covered the not giving a shit part, so what about the other three? Well, I just took some pride in having already written 2 paragraphs. Feels good. Feeling good helps you stay motivated. When something's being done, even if it's not all that great, you're doing something at least, right? Motivation can also come from anticipation. I can't wait to finish this article now so I can read it because I am a horrible narcissistic bastard. Loving your own stuff is cool. Do that. Just don't overdo it, like Lars Ulrich. Don't be a Lars. Huge tangent here, but I can't believe "Ulrich" isn't in the spell checker by now. Maybe the English major graduates of 1894 or whichever group writes the dictionaries these days haven't heard of this newfangled "Metallica" thing. It's not like they've been famous for over 20 years or anything. I don't care how red and squiggly that line under "Ulrich" is, I'm not changing it. Take that, spell checker.

Okay essay time on the nature of human creativity is over now. Let's talk about other stuff. So in my computer science studies, I often have to do some runtime analysis, or other various things that involve timing a piece of code. It just so happens that, as a typical computer scientist, I am incredibly lazy. Thus, I don't want to have to manually enter data points into Excel to make a nice graph to show that an algorithm runs in O(n²) time WHEN I ALREADY GODDAMN KNOW IT DOES. Computer science RAGE! So I looked into Google Chart Tools for some nice graphs. It's some pretty simple but effective stuff. Just copy-paste Google's sample html, change some options and data and voilà! A cool graph. But I'd still have to do all the data entry myself, and I'm lazy. So I wrote a nifty piece of Java code that takes data printed to a file in a simpler-than-XML format (sloppy and informal, yes, but also easy for newbies to learn) and turns into into an html file that displays one of those nifty Google charts!

Googly!

It still has some bugs, and currently only supports the line graph style I need for my assignments, so at the moment it's not worth showing off. I'll put some more work into it, and when it's done I'll give an update with a link to a jar, the source I'll have repo'd somewhere on the interwebs, and a little guide on how to use it. Not that it'll be useful to any of my zero readers. But whatever.

I'm so clever.