Random-ish Shuffle June 27, 2022

Boris or Symphony X for me, I need to think on this, too. If it were any other SX song, than Boris for sure. This just so happens to be my favorite SX song, too in quite possibly the most influential album of my life lmao

Edit: I went with Boris

I was afraid Moonchild was going to dominate the chart. Thankfully Renaissance appeared to balance it out lol I mean , let's be realy, Moonchild is one of King Crimson's most boring songs, after the first two minutes - there's so much better music that appeared here. But it is King Crimson, after all, so of course it'll dominate the poll. At least the Renaissance song is worth winning the poll.

Regarding Muse, I'm not sure whether I should ever take them seriously or not. Supposedly they're entirely sincere, and they don't tend joke around, from what I've heard, and they use over the top imagery to express their beliefs (such as the song above).

Regarding Neurosis. They are the textbook example of an "album band" - that is, Neurosis doesn't usually sound good when listening to one or two songs. Their albums almost always exceed 60 minutes, and are defined by building up, on a track-by-track basis rather than within each song, and then cooling down at the same slow rate, if that makes sense. For example, the song posted here was the build-up to the penultimate song, and the climax, of the album and serves as an interlude. Basically it was the cool-down from the intensity preceding it and the build-up to the climax of the album, before album cooled down again and closed. Through Silver in Blood, at the time of its release in 1996, was quite possibly the heaviest and darkest album to ever achieve commercial success, and it still holds up today. Over the past 26 years though, their sound has become more calm in exchange for ramping up the melancholy - they may be the most melancholic commercially successful band in the world, and their later sound definitely mirrors Strengths of Fates. By itself, this song doesn't do much, but in the context of the album, as a whole, as you pointed out, it's incredible. After all the chaos that preceded it, and upon hearing all chaos that succeeded it, it serves as a great segue-way into the end of the album.

Why there are so many songs? I did the shuffle a first time before I yielded these results, but the first eight or so were mega-popular bands, and the other seven were short enough to listen to. I re-rolled with the same number. lol I don't actually think my "shuffle mode" on my computer is completely random (I made a comment about this), so I'm going to try again tomorrow, but with six artists. I think that would be a good number.

How do you shuffle, by the way?

Yes it's my whole collection. And I'm going to re-roll on some tracks - just the ones I know will dominate the poll when matched up with the rest of my collection, eg. King Crimson, Yes, Black Sabbath, as well as segues and interludes; nowadays there is a Youtube video for even the most obscure music, but in the rare case I cannot find a video, I'll reluctantly re-roll. I use Clementine player, an open source similar alternative to VLC that allows for more customization options than the latter. Frankly, I wouldn't trust WMP to have unbiased RNG, either, as my iPhone also over-represents a lot of artists. I think I'll just use my Python code which has given me the closest thing to true random results lol

Yes it's my whole collection. And I'm going to re-roll on some tracks - just the ones I know will dominate the poll when matched up with the rest of my collection, eg. King Crimson, Yes, Black Sabbath, as well as segues and interludes; nowadays there is a Youtube video for even the most obscure music, but in the rare case I cannot find a video, I'll reluctantly re-roll. I use Clementine player, an open source similar alternative to VLC that allows for more customization options than the latter. Frankly, I wouldn't trust WMP to have unbiased RNG, either, as my iPhone also over-represents a lot of artists. I think I'll just use my Python code which has given me the closest thing to true random results lol

[/QUOTE]

Yes, I've also found most obscure tracks on youtube (which is great) but there are exceptions, like (for example) I have several songs that are from friends and/or local artists who have very little or no material posted online, and nobody on PA would be remotely familiar with them anyway.  Regarding WMP: it used to seem biased and over-represent certain artists or keep repeating certain popular tracks, but within the last year, that problem seems to have gone away--not sure why. Perhaps Microsoft did some kind of upgrade.