This is music without melody, Glass's repertoire of techniques at its most spare--just rhythmic pattern (in his signature arpeggiated chord) and rudimentary, stable harmony in which the extension and contraction of time/rhythmic values is the only appreciable "content" of the pieces. This music can produce strange effects on a listener; one can almost sense one's own faculty of audition as being the true "content". I liken it to a Gestalt switch, or the experience of seeing a wheel spin fast enough to produce the illusion of slow or even backwards motion. One realizes stimulation of the eyes is but half the experience; the other half is the intentional mind itself. Part One is a slow, meditative version of this idea; it's an amazing sonic Persian rug of pulsing, interlocked patterns, and perhaps the most beautiful piece he ever wrote. One can pick out between the instruments a melody of whatever length one wishes, creating the music for themselves.
Glass's and Tim Page's liner notes are illuminating as well.

I've been listening to this CD for 15 years, and am still stunned by it. Each one of these soft pieces is a world unto itself. The closer one listens, the more one discovers there. The wonderfully precise programmatic song titles long ago led me into "visualizations" of the "mental places" the music conjures (this is one aspect of Eno's "ambient" ethic--these pieces of music are set in imaginary PLACES. The other part of the ethic is that these are meant to become a part of your space, like your furniture or paintings). Like "The Plateaux of Mirror," their previous collaboration, Budd seems to be the primary keyboard player, with Eno's chosen task being the setting of those aloof and cyclical compositions into very wide sonic environments. There are a few experiments, too--the last two tracks are re-recordings of tracks 4 & 1, slowed down and reprocessed into new forms. Simply wonderful!
This album completes a trio--the others being "Thursday Afternoon" and "Ambient 4: On Land"--of the most masterful use of electronic equipment ever recorded.

The press, in their interminable search for the this week's savior(s) of rock and roll, heaped an incredible amount of hype on these five lads' heads...That J. Casablancas's father is famous and wealthy is a non-issue, and the most important thing is the music, of course. In some people's resentful minds, his father's fame somehow negates their achievement, but reactions like that simply smack of jealousy that a band can come out of nowhere in a mere two-year career to produce such a great debut. The music is always what counts, and Julian Casablancas obviously loves the Velvet Underground, writing direct, tuneful songs that happen to at times evoke the sensibility of the New York scene of the Velvets' era.

That said, this is a great debut album. No-frills, hook-laden songs embedded in a spare production which, I'm sure, was crafted to capture live performance. This set of songs point to some even greater things to come. Let's hope they keep the songs as simple and direct on their next album. Horns would be a great addition to the already implied Motown feel of some of their material.

This is a brilliant work of art, the best rock album that I've heard in ten years since My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" (although musically it's nothing like that groundbreaker). The Soft Bulletin is melodic, the arrangements are complex, and yet it retains a sincere sense of innocence. To me, it seems overall to be a concept album about dealing with the defeat of idealism, the struggle to retain one's humanity in the face of our chaotic technological world, and a battle against the all-too-easy retreat into irony. The beautiful fragility of Wayne Coyne's voice says it all, and is a perfect foil for the elaborate orchestrations. The lyrics are deceptively simple, and yield many revelations after repeated listenings; for instance, the lyrics to the second track seem to be simultaneously about the Manhattan Project and the peace movement, the verbal equivalent to a Gestalt illusion!

(And I recognize the photo on the cover of the CD--it's a picture from LIFE magazine from the 1960s of a teenager on LSD dancing with his shadow).

I love this album, and listen to it every day.

This is an excellent introduction to one school of thought in cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence, namely, the "bottom-up" approach. Written in a serial style, with each chapter occupying a single page, and relatively jargon-free (Minsky only introduces his technical vocabulary when necessary), the theory expounded in this book will surely yield astounding results when the hardware in our computers are capable of implementing it.

In a sense, this book is a mirror to the problems covered in Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations"--albeit with tighter arguments and far less meandering than Wittgenstein's groundbreaking work (this was published three years before Wittgenstein's posthumous PI). Both men were dedicated to freeing philosophy from what Ryle terms "category errors"--misapplications of the ordinary referential scope of a given term ("mind" as a concept which must necessarily oppose "substance" for instance--this duality forces us to ascribe and essentialize qualities to the incorporeal along the same lines as that of substance, by giving it attributes on the linguistic model of physical objects) These misapplications have led philosophers into vast problems which, by their very nature as linguistic misuses, are unsolvable (but not dis-solvable). Parts of it will provoke cries of "behaviorism!", but Ryle included a chapter near the end distancing his stance from Skinner et al. (how well he manages in this is debatable!) Brilliant, straightforward, and elegant, this is one the best works of 20th-century philosophy.

This book is a true classic, both in content and presentation; Quine's pithy style, sometimes ironic, is singular in the literature of analytic philosophy. This book describes the generation of reference and logical categories out of the confluence of "sense-data" and "stimulus synonymy", and proceeds to plow through every permutation of problems which can arise from such an endeavor. Chapter two (the [in-]famous "indeterminacy of translation" thesis) is a fascinating linguistic reformulation of the "other minds" problem, demonstrating that one must conclude a type of "ontological relativity" amongst speakers. Along with Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," Ryle's The Concept of Mind," and Sellars' "Philosophy and the Empiricism of Mind," Quine's major work completes the quadrivium of mid-20th century analytic philosophy.

This book is a true classic, both in content and presentation; Quine's pithy style, sometimes ironic, is singular in analytic philosophy. This book describes the generation of reference and logical categories out of the confluence of "sense-data" and "stimulus synonymy," answering with consistency many perennial questions in ontology and epistemology in the process. Chapter two (the infamous "indeterminacy of translation" thesis) is a fascinating linguistic reformulation of the "other minds" problem, demonstrating that one must conclude a type of "ontological relativity" amongst speakers. Along with Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," Ryle's The Concept of Mind," and Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Quine's magnum opus completes the quadrivium of mid-20th century analytic philosophy which together rang the death-knell of Cartesianism.

Here we see the attempted christening of a new language game, in which a simple-minded metaphor ("multiple drafts") is expected to do all the heavy lifting. Dennett ignores the central question, to be posed all over again: What is the field, what is the space, what is the "?" which is experiencing each draft? (Does this "multiple drafts" metaphor even apply to the conscious beings within cultures that lack the concept of "drafts", or the concept even "fiction" itself? It's scope of application is circular, bound into cultures which possess the requisite language-games) This is what you get when an ordinary-language-philosopher, drunk on the possibilities of parallel-distributed processing and Quinean physicalism, tries to come up against that which cannot be explained. Redescribe the "mystery" as a non-starter, collapse the definitions into your own parlance, and rhetorically fire away. Cheap. Two stars for some interesting anecdotal information, at least.

If you want to read the work of someone who is truly committed to explaining consciousness on available evolutionary evidence, try Gerald Edelman. At least he has proposed a falsifiable (and thus scientific) theory.

"Trout Mask Replica" reminds me of that old saying about randomness and the genesis of the universe: it was as likely as a tornado ripping through a junkyard and leaving an assembled 747 in its wake.

Hearing this music for the first time, it might sound like Howlin' Wolf singing over a needle skipping wildly across a Delta blues record. Apart from the fact that there are actual homegrown musical rules operating here (if anyone would care to listen closely enough) it is beyond that fact a perfect example of individuated musical expression. Zappa's un-production allows a clear channel separation of the two guitars and bass. Most of the time, on the wilder tracks such as "Frownland" or "Steal Sofly Thru Snow" they play in separate meters (and often with the bass in a third meter), changing into the next section of the song at the junction between the two (5/4 x 3/4=15 measures, for instance), while Drumbo plays polyrhymically on top of it all...But analysis does nothing to capture what it is to actually experience "Trout Mask Replica". Ya either get it, or ya don't. Don Van Vliet claims he spontaneously wrote this entire album at a piano in eight hours and meticulously taught 19-year olds Antennae Jimmy Semens and Zoot Horn Rollo and Rockette Morton each part, having them rehearse it eight hours a day for several months until they went into Zappa's studio. They could play it exactly the same each time, from start to finish. This was all done to capture an expression of naivete. The result is a raw and jagged explosion of blues passed through a blender and reassembled as free music where your mind is actually creating the structures of melody.