The Rehashed Idea of a Music Pantheon, or My "Top" 100 Albums

Certainly, some may notice that I have already done this, and veritably 30ish of these artists/albums reappear from that list. However, I decided to add on some artists and albums in an effort to make a top 100 list of albums. Many artists are not here because I forgot or struggled to decide on their most moving work of art - so if something is not here, that is probably why. I have become rather out of touch with my favorite musics so this became an issue of memory, not simply judgment. By now means will this list never change - in fact, count on it. I could find a few new albums that totally deserve to be here over others. Maybe I'll realize Pan Sonic's Kesto really deserves to be on here. Maybe I'll one day realize that folk, hip hop, electronic (non-ambient), ska, etc exist too and it's not all just rock and metal music. Someday. Before I engage the same complaints, see this list, that purports to be my music pantheon, and judge me accordingly. (Easy on the tomatoes, though.)

Table 1. The albums tentatively included inside my music pantheon. Listed in no particular order. This list is a terrible attempt at representing my favorite albums, but it really just ended up being a representation of my music taste but with more artists on it.

Artist	Album
Asobi Seksu	Citrus
ClariS	Party Time
Brian Eno	On Land
Eluvium	Nightmare Ending
Harold Budd	Avalon Sutra
Brian Eno and Harold Budd	The Pearl
Asian Kung Fu Generation	Sol-Fa
Dead Can Dance	Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
Babymetal	Babymetal
Yo La Tengo	I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
Do Make Say Think	Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn
Gojira	From Mars to Sirius
Murray Perahia	Bach: Goldberg Variations
Deaf Center	Pale Ravine
Opeth	Still Life
The Pillows	Happy Bivouac
Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, and Koji Kondo	The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker OST
Akira Yamaoka	Silent Hill 2 OST
Blur	Think Tank
Howard Shore	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings OST
Warpaint	Warpaint
Throwing Muses	Throwing Muses
Sonic Youth	EVOL
Neurosis	Live at Roadburn 2007
Deftones	Koi No Yokan
Mogwai	Come On Die Young
Slowdive	Souvlaki
Cormorant	Dwellings
Joy Division	Closer
My Dying Bride	The Dreadful Hours
Yndi Halda	Yndi Halda
Seattle Symphony Orchestra, John Luther Adams	Become Ocean
Seattle Symphony Orchestra	Symphony No. 9 in E Minor[1]
Travis	The Boy With No Name
Agalloch	Marrow of the Spirit
Shonen Knife	Let's Knife
Behemoth	The Satanist
Deafheaven	Sunbather
Clint Mansell	The Fountain
The Cure	The Head on the Door
Godspeed You! Black Emperor	Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
NaS	Illmatic
Hole	Live Through This
Interpol	Turn on the Bright Lights
Isis	Panopticon
Joe Hisaishi	Spirited Away OST
John Williams	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban OST
Katatonia	The Great Cold Distance
Koh Ohtani	Shadow of the Colossus OST
Laal	Umeed e Sahar
Lostprophets	Start Something
Luna	Bewitched
Low	I Could Live In Hope
Massive Attack	Mezzanine
Mazzy Star	So Tonight That I could See
The Melvins	Houdini
PJ Harvey	Dry
Pulp	Different Class
The Roots	Things Fall Apart
Russian Circles	Enter
Hiroyuki Sawano	Attack on Titan OST
Sigur Ros	Agaetis Byrjun
Siouxsie and the Banshees	Juju
Wipers	Youth of America
Wire	154
Wolves in the Throne Room	Two Hunters
Yuck	Yuck
Beck	Mutations
Belly	Star
Boris	Amplifier Worship
Nils Frahm	Screws
Dir en grey	Withering to Death
Cursive	Ugly Organ
Norma Jean	Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child
DJ Krush	Jaku
Menomena	Moms
DJ Okawari	Diorama
Mono	You Are There
Fountains of Wayne	Welcome Interstate Managers
Sigh	Graveward
Dodecahedron	Dodecahedron
Nachtmystium	Silencing Machine
Pallbearer	Foundations of Burden
Altar of Plagues	Teethed Glory and Injury
Mitsuko Uchida: Cleveland orchestra	Mozart: Piano Concertos #23 and #24
Explosions in the Sky	The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place
My Bloody Valentine	Isn't Anything
Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard	Batman Begins OST
Herbert Tachezi	Bach: Toccata & Fugue, Organ Works
Mahito Yokota	Super Mario Galaxy OST
*	Okami OST
Martin O'Donnell	Halo 3 ODST OST
Stone Temple Pilots	Tiny Music….
Jenny Lewis	The Voyager
Cocteau Twins	Garlands
The Jesus and Mary Chain	Psychocandy
Anathema	The Silent Enigma
New Order	Lowlife
Nirvana	In Utero
Radiohead	Amnesiac

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[1] This refers to Dvorak’s “From The New World”

Yes, yes, another attempt; and a review of a concert I went to

Hello, everyone.

I am here today to pathetically attempt to atone for my sins of not posting. I am still working on some applications. I would like to share one of my application essays - this will be contingent upon what response I get from the programs. If I'm rejected, I can probably put it up, but I would need to wait until a final decision in the instance that I make my way past the first stage. However, I will still be busy through Tuesday, so we'll see.

Recently, #200 was obtained on Myanimelist, so I should make that top 20 list of anime. I have established my top 20 list (bear in mind that this is approximate with no claims to objectivity) but now I need to write brief descriptions, which may take a while. Honestly, my memory is still rather poor, so I may need to revisit them. Also, this list will totally be presented in a normal, expected manner - no snarks, I promise. I promise.

In other news, I saw a concert, Wednesday night, featuring the tabla ustad Zakir Hussain, a singer who was well-versed in classical Indian styles of music, and some other musicians associated with film music and jazz music. (The tabla is an Indian percussion instrument and 'ustad' means master, more or less.) Naturally, I decided to go there to see Zakir Hussain play tablas - this served to be rather interesting because he had an exceptional control over dynamics; he also had some Western percussion parts on his ensemble, allowing him to incorporate, mainly, cymbal sounds. As far as the other musicians, Dave Holland on upright bass (yep, the orchestral one), Louis something or other on piano, a singer, and a guitarist. The concert was essentially jazz fused with Indian classical music, though some elements were clearly pretty modern (at least relatively). 

The first few pieces were mainly jazz-heavy, making them rather hard for my tired mind to grapple onto. However, the piece that was a raga (ancient style of song specific to Indian music) was quite fascinating because it relied heavily on sustained instrumentation. Very minimal, allowing for the singing to take the focus. The buildup, in a way, reminded me of Godspeed You! Black Emperor  - Western experimental music seems to similarly enjoy the use of drone to establish a background before reaching a climax.  Through these works, I realized that my enjoyment focused on the Indian components - the singing and tabla - followed by the bass and piano. However, I found the guitar to be unnecessary because it only supported small portions of the songs and rarely got any emphasis. Nor did I find him an effective performer - he kept looking at his music and did not seem as convincing as the other performers. In that regard, Zakir Hussain, who was smiling for a lot of the concert, emitted the greatest aura. He also would speak to the audience with flourishes of both music references and personal anecdote, which invigorated the musical efforts. So, it wasn't just instrumentals or vocals or some mishmash, but something with a lot of energy.

Overall, I found the pieces with the Indian singer to be more enjoyable than the jazz pieces but both were rather neat. My one gripe is that I truly wanted more classical components, but I could tell that was not the emphasis either. If I wanted, I could probably look up Carnatic and Hindustani music (the folk music of South and North India respectively), so I really should not hold onto that complaint. I bet there's ragas galore in recordings! I do not think I will get a chance to have an experience like this again, so good for me for going. I probably would not have done anything worthwhile that evening, so I can say it was worth it. For the record, I probably have not been to a true concert - both of my volition and actually requiring money - in years, so I do not have much of a reference point. However, I am glad that I could pay attention better than I thought - if I had faced this music in an album format, I would have probably taken many breaks. But here I could not take breaks and that was probably for the better.

The Idea of a 'Music Pantheon'

Codifying one’s favorites certainly, from a philosophical angle, emphasizes churning out decisive judgments of art over simply trying to appreciate the art you engage. Is a work alright, great, or a complex mosaic of both? Trying to pick “the best” leads to a simplification where a gradient can be dismissed: the average score across the entire work is given and treated as representative rather than acknowledging nuance. For example, to me, the Terra Route of Rewrite has a very mediocre start because it, in my view, presents uninteresting and possibly counter-productive themes on terrorism. However, this work seems to challenge itself, and grows into an ultimately powerful narrative about the environment and humanity’s role in the world. Yet when I characterize this route as “very good,” I may neglect to mention that the beginning is mediocre to me. By entering a “favorites” mindset, I would just describe the work as “very good” and drop the qualifier.  

However, determining a work’s quality can be ambiguous: a simple frameshift may be all that separates the good and the great, or the bad and the good. When choosing favorites, this frameshift is even harder – then the distinction between the good and the great must be coupled with the distinction between a cool work of art and a favorite work of art. Can only veritable masterpieces be included? Or can non-masterpiece works be included provided they provide similar levels of enjoyment? 

These musings led me to codify my own music pantheon, the collection of albums that certainly describe my music taste well. As of now, this pantheon is incomplete. It can be seen below.

Table 1. The albums tentatively included inside my music pantheon. Listed in no particular order. This list is more meant to represent my music taste as a whole rather than my favorite albums and artists, per se.

Artist	Album
Asobi Seksu	Citrus
ClariS	Party Time
Brian Eno	On Land
Eluvium	Nightmare Ending
Harold Budd	Avalon Sutra
Brian Eno and Harold Budd	The Pearl
Asian Kung Fu Generation	Sol-Fa
Dead Can Dance	Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
Babymetal	Babymetal
Yo La Tengo	I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
Do Make Say Think	Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn
Gojira	From Mars to Sirius
Murray Perahia	Bach: Goldberg Variations
Deaf Center	Pale Ravine
Opeth	Still Life
The Pillows	Happy Bivouac
Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, and Koji Kondo	The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker OST
Akira Yamaoka	Silent Hill 2 OST
Blur	Think Tank
Howard Shore	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings OST
Warpaint	Warpaint
Throwing Muses	Throwing Muses
Sonic Youth	EVOL
Neurosis	Live at Roadburn 2007
Deftones	Koi No Yokan
Mogwai	Come On Die Young
Slowdive	Souvlaki
Cormorant	Dwellings
Joy Division	Closer
My Dying Bride	The Dreadful Hours
Yndi Halda	Yndi Halda
Seattle Symphony Orchestra, John Luther Adams	Become Ocean
Seattle Symphony Orchestra	Symphony No. 9 in E Minor[1]

From reading this list, I can tell that I stretched beyond albums that I consider perfection. To be honest, I just cannot conceptualize a “perfect” album – a score of 100%, to me, represents the ability to move me and teach me and not the absence of flaws. Part of this mindset stems from my fickleness – many times I am not in the mood for many of these albums, which could seem like a flaw. With this list, I described what comprises my music taste, not as much a telling of my favorite albums. In my pantheon, context is apparently valuable; I picked albums I enjoyed while emphasizing musical diversity. Here, post-punk, orchestral music, shoegaze, and whatever-the-heck-Dead-Can-Dance-is are all represented. And this list extends beyond America. I tried to grant a more worldly perspective here.

However, I fear that bias permeates this list in a systematic manner. On one hand, I clearly do not have music represented outside of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, and the United States. Nor are works of electronic music – how could I forget Aphex Twin and Pan Sonic?? – or hip hop or folk or blues, or really a whole host of styles. Furthermore, Black and Hispanic – and related – artists are completely not here. However, in making this list, I strove to not include albums just to counteract gaps – this list cannot be called all-inclusive. I doubt that it can even represent my music interests fully. For example, Portland Taiko’s Big Bang and NaS’s Illmatic are both works that I enjoy that would increase the diversity of music found here. Many works hint at broader horizons, even though I did not include them here. Perhaps how I chose albums for the “pantheon” is wrong and I should decide whether I want ‘favorites’ or my ‘music taste.’ With time, I hope to refine the entries and become more satisfied with this list. However, music taste is intractable so perhaps I need to sample – that is, actually listen to more music – albums and create a better list. This entire exercise has helped me understand the development of my taste rather than uncover definitively my taste. I probably will not learn how to make more specific, decisive judgments. However, I better understand the effort that goes into actually selecting favorite works of art.

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[1] This refers to Dvorak’s “From The New World”

Unveiling the J.A.M. Journal of Post-modern Media Consumption

Issue 1, Volume 1
“An Invective for the Co-opting of Art into That Which May Not Be Enjoyed: Special Essay Introduction”
Zeldaru^*
* - J.A.M.School of Cinema, Ribbonroomia

For years, the acts of creating and consuming art has been considered a noble pursuit. Having a hand in many different areas, asides from suggesting flexibility of mind, is itself praiseworthy and a hallmark of civilization itself. However, as some sources have indicated (animemaru), art has recently, in a fit of post-modernism, lost all entertainment value – rather, one only focuses on consuming numbers of works of art but not the quantity. Look to noted scholar FireFlinger to see how a MyAnimeList focuses on increasing the list length rather than the diversity of works or even getting a life and watching something other than anime. Though anime is an insular medium, its demise approximates the decline of other forms of art. Other researcher, Deadlymushroom, forgoes such a simple method of tracking consumption and instead focuses on engaging art while performing unrelated tasks – veritably, Deadly’s method, while seemingly more natural, mocks art itself by inducing a quarter-attention-span field around any and all works of art rather than making a sincere effort. This behavior fits my predictive modeling of the decline of art based on data collected (not shown or collected). Data secretly (not) acquired from Deadly without permission suggests the following model: dq/dt = -q, where q is quality of consumption, resulting in exponential decay. Rather, Justin is doomed to exponential decay of quality of consumption as he grows older without a true solution. The only solution, apparently, is to travel back in time and alter one’s path, which has not yet been supported by science. This conclusion suggests an erroneous mathematical model that must be calibrated to include variables such as the diversity of media consumed, the relative length of a work of art, and a person’s net consumptive capabilities. Future work will further characterize this decline in quality of consumption while examining the consequences of such an action. Lastly, a means of slowing the steep decline will be determined…someday.

Acknowledgements
I thank Deadlymushroom for unwillingly and unwittingly providing data for a mathematical model. I also appreciate FireFlinger providing data that is freely available and public anyways.

References
“A Self Citation.” 2015. Print.
Zeldaru. 2015. All mediums known to mankind.