The moment that everyone ever has been waiting for is approaching, and is here.  Time to publish this list.

TEN
The Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

Oh Yoshimi!  They don't believe me!  But that's ok, because you did for me what the other really big Flaming Lips record did for Dora in Questionable Content -- taught me that it's ok for music to be happy.  The album starts a story about a girl who must battle robots for mankind, and about one robot, who falls in love with her.  It's simultaneously the most campy and most touching moment in indie pop lyrics, please don't try to argue.  Yoshimi is the result of bright, punchy, perfectionist pop production married to psychedila, existentialism, and science fiction; a combination that, as I agree with Faye, results in Bliss in its most Condensed Form.  Some of my other picks might be more of a niche thing, but for this one, I guarantee that your life is not complete without hearing this album.

NINE
Sigur Ros
Takk...

Ahh, Sigur Rós, that band that Radiohead likes.  No one does dreamy and ethereal like Sigur Rós.  No one will pretend that anyone else makes more beautiful music nowadays, but to be honest, a lot of the time they put me to sleep.  I like them, but after the pretension of ()'s eight untitled tracks I kind of stopped listening.  Takk… proved that the band was capable of perfectly integrating beauty and serenity with energy and tension (rather than pretension) even more wonderfully than they had on Ágætis byrjun, but I don't mean that they compromised.  What I mean is that Takk… is just mindblowingly perfect.


EIGHT
Low
Things We Lost in the Fire

What on earth could I say about Low?  Low spearheaded the movement against post-grunge by playing slow, playing soft, and by playing simple.  Things We Lost In The Fire is a masterpiece that simultaneously celebrates and mourns the successes and failures of indie rock as a whole.  When I listen to Low, I feel.  The vocals rip my heart apart.  Low have an unparalleled ability to control all the emotions of man.  So be warned.


SEVEN
Shellac
1000 Hurts

This is the first one that people are going to disagree with me about.  Steve Albini is possibly the last great record producer.  No one is as meticulous, as picky, or as principled.  Also no one is as idiosyncratic or sarcastic.  And no one, no one, no one, is as violently angry.  It doesn't matter what the topic is, Albini is pissed.  Annoying watch?  Beat the shit out of the salesman.  Cheating spouse?  Fucking kill 'em.  Shellac's music is bizzare and angular.  Self-described as a "minimalist trio", there is no one who lays down a more powerful groove.  Albini and Weston are like ying and yang on guitar and bass, they play grating singular riffs with no note out of place that somehow combine into a cohesive mass of sound that, propelled further by Trainor's primal drumming, obliterate the listener with no chance of survival.  1000 Hurts is an image of everything that stupid loud punk rock could have been capable of but never was, and then the band members piss on it.  That is how provoking it is.  If you're like me, you're thinking "genius", but in case you're not, you should probably not listen to this album.

(Oh yeah, Albini produced that Low album that's in number eight.)

SIX
...and You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
Source Tags and Codes

No one has done for music what Trail of Dead have done on this album.  Source Tags and Codes takes the listener on an epic journey careening through one emotional dichotomy after another: despair and hope, tranquility and rage. power and weakness; until it finally lands on futility and frustration.  I'm not talking about just lyrics; I can hear said total emotional depth in every note every band member plays.  And that is where Trail of Dead prove that this isn't just a fluke.  The technical mastery of the aesthetics of dynamics, texture, and sound and silence both in their composition, and in the record production, wows me again at every listen.  To my ears, ST&C is what terms like "progressive rock" that bill themselves as being as artistically capable as classical music should describe, rather than the masturbatory shredheading of emotionless hacks.  Source Tags and Codes' immense amount of covered ground in musical and emotional territory is only surpassed by the finest of Romantic-era symphonies, and likewise sets an as of yet unsurpassed standard for epic rock music.

FIVE
Deerhunter
Cryptograms

Deerhunter's Brandford Cox succeeds where anyone else fails in what is essentially, stream-of-consciousness noodling, in his side-project, Atlas Sound.  It's great stuff, but it's way too personal for my tastes.  But in Deerhunter, I get a sense of balance.  It's like all these forces behind the scenes are combining and uncombining and pulling apart and coming together to create this massive chaotic groove-thing that somehow dissolves into order on short notice.  Cryptograms is a thorough survey of this dynamic.  If you like music to be weird, but lush and complex and almost politely loud, this is what you've been looking for.

FOUR
edIT
Certified Air Raid Material

Hip-hop had gotten boring for me.  The record label turn all the rawest, most in-your-face styles of music into boring-ass, reheated pop.  This is why hip-hop as a whole stopped being relevant to me... sometime before I even started listening to hip-hop at all.  There ain't no innovators around anywhere, you know?  edIT's debut, Crying Over Pros For No Reason was a fairly predictable glitch/IDM album.  Don't get me wrong, it's some of the best glitchy IDM I've ever heard.  But what edIT has done on Certified Air Raid Material is so much more.  He's simultaneously returned to danceable hip-hop and jumped off the edge into avant-land.  I mean, these beats are fresh.  "Fresh beats" are not on my usual list of what it takes to innovate.  But then there's the nasty-ass in-your-face buzz synths supporting the most eclectic collection of MCs.  It's like he's daring you to complain.  I clearly don't know how to talk about rap, but take my word for it, Certified Air Raid Material is pretty much the only new thing in hip-hop in the past decade with any universal appeal at all.

THREE
The Notwist
Neon Golden

Say what you will about whether you like it or not, electronic-infused indie is the single most noticeable trend in the music of the naughts.  You got straight up indietronica like The Postal Service, Electric President, Tunng, whatever, but there isn't a band that didn't consider electronics at some point, believe it.  I could also mention Radiohead, but I don't want to.  What The Notwist did on Neon Golden is more than what Radiohead did on Kid A or The Postal Service did on Give Up.  It's my opinion that those two are more appreciated for their novelty than for their genius.  Don't get me wrong, they ain't bad albums, but they pale in comparison to Neon Golden.  This album combines the cold bleakness of glitch/IDM technique with a warmth and lushness that you can't argue with.  Markus Acher's soft subtle voice seduces the listener while pops and hisses meld with the sound of, uh, banjo.  It's a strange combination but they do it with confidence and with impunity, and keep up the variety with no two songs managing to sound alike, despite the commonality of technique.  I don't think anyone can go wrong with listening to Neon Golden.

TWO
Boards of Canada
Geogaddi

Oh god, it's so dark.  What can I say about Geogaddi?  It's the most loved and cherished downtempo electronic album ever, other than that other Boards of Canada album from the 90s.  But as I listen to it today all that strikes me are colors and feelings and other things I can't seem to put into words.  It's like some painting of nothing, just cold hard shapes and colors.  But no it isn't.  There's something hidden.  If you squint your ears just right, the drones and samples start to meld and melt into something beautiful and dark that Boards of Canada have captured.  It took me a few dozen listens to figure out what it is, and then I felt silly because they told me in the samples.  "The past inside the present."  "It's a beautiful place."  I can't tell you why this album is #2 on my list, the reasons are obscure and possibly personal (heaven forbid), but the magnitude of Boards of Canada's accomplishment is undeniable.

ONE
Tortoise
Standards

Things are different now.  That's what I think about Standards.  Post-rock, the texture-focused, pretentious-as-all-hell, and, by the year 2000, completely played out undercurrent of indie rock was always known for its subtlety.  But things are different now.  Standards is simultaneously definitively post-rock and bold.  Standards is a precisely calculated blow against both the idea of music and the idea of what it takes to make a blow against the idea of music.  I'll wait here while you untangle that statement.  I like challenging music, music that leaves me with no clue as to what string of cause-and-effect relationships in someone's head ended up with this album ending up in existence.  But that implies a certain avant-garde-ness that usually results in something painful to listen to.  Standards is as avant-garde as it comes, but is simultaneously melodic, consonant, and listenable.  What I'm saying is that Tortoise musical conventions, including the conventions of music that defies musical conventions.  I'm having one of those explanatory failures in my careenium right now, so maybe I'll just describe a few of the tracks.

The first track, "Seneca" opens with seriously wailing on at least three distorted drum kits, basically with someone playing as fast as possible on all of them simultaneously.  On top of this is a slow, languid clean guitar melody that meanders peacefully among the chaos.  After a short pause in the middle, the strangest groove emerges from the band.  Analogue synths play along with harpsicord, samples, and distorted electric guitar in a jerky modal vamp reminescent (to me) of certain parts of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew.  Eventually it dissolves into a near-random collection of hand claps fighting against some of the most unusual samples I've ever heard, and then dissolves into the next track.  It sounds like I'm describing chaos, but it is clear to me that every single note has been chosen specifically for its own special purpose.

The more minimalist track 6, "Eden 2" starts with a primal, hypnotic synthbass and drum duel in unusual meter.  An exotic and playful interplay between guitar and another synthesizer occur, before a bone rattling 6-string bass lays a groove an octave under the synthbass.  The guitar and synth conclude with and quickly evolving set of harmony, that is then played backwards then looped while the drums go through a series of textural and rhythmic evolutions, concluding in more meandering playful guitar work.

Track 8, "Blackjack", is a constantly modulating powerhouse of groove and melody.  It begins with a contrast of keyboards and guitar on two simple melodies, but quickly explodes into an evocative collection of instrumental and melodic juxtopositions.  After the 1:40 mark, the game changes and the song's energy seems to periodically double from then on.  "Blackjack" leaves the listener breatless as it shifts through instruments and moods and melodies at a dizzying rate.

Man I just don't know how to describe this to you, you know?

Unlike FLACs and other lossless audio formats, MP3 files have a specifically predetermined bitrate.  The MP3 algorithm removes information from the raw data until it meets the specified bitrate.  MP3 encoders allow several options concerning how to define this bitrate.

CBR (Constant Bit Rate) is the simplest way.  You simply type in what bitrate you want (from a discrete set of choices), and the algorithm removes information from all parts of the song until every part takes up the same amount of space.  The lowest tolerable bitrate for music listeners is usually considered to be 128 kbps (kilobits per second), but to trained ears this is insufficient.  The lowest allowed bitrate on a private music bittorrent tracker I have ever seen is 192 kbps.  However, for other types of audio, such as audiobooks or speeches, 96 kbps or even lower may sound fine.

A very complex sound might require more useful information to be removed to meet a specific bitrate than a very simple one would.  And songs typically vary throughout the song in terms of the complexity of their sounds.  So there might be a song where 128 kbps is fine for the chorus, but the verses sound terrible and would require 192.  But if you encode the whole thing at 192, the chorus would sound no better than it did at 128, so you are wasting disk space.  The solution to this conundrum is VBR, Variable Bit Rate.

For encoding audio to VBR, the program first scans the entire song and determines how much information would be removed from each chunk of it, then encodes it such that the same amount has been removed from each part.  This way, for instance, if a song had a beat of complete silence, the silent part would take up no disk space at all, since removing ALL of the information would be equivalent to removing none of it in terms of sound.  Parts of the song between here and there, would of course, be assigned different bitrates.

When the user uses the program, they can assign a maximum allowed bitrate, minimum allowed bitrate, average desired bitrate, or they can use any number of psychoacoustically defined presets.

In LAME, the most popular program used to create MP3 files, these presets are given labels V9 through V0, V0 being the highest quality, and averaging about 256 kbps, but sounding equivalent, in theory, to 320 kbps CBR.  In older versions, they were labelled APS (equivalent to V2), APX (equivalent to V0), API (equivalent to 320 CBR).

So, summary:

RAW (WAV, AIFF) is a list of numbers; Lossless (FLAC, APE)  is a version of those numbers that takes less space; Lossy (MP3, OGG) removes information from those numbers that no one will miss; VBR (V0, APX) requires even less space than CBR (128, 320, API) in terms of lossy implementations.

In the Real World, sound is analog.  If you could slow down time and have an infinitely fast air pressure meter and hold it in front of a speaker, it would move smoothly no matter how much you slowed down time; it would never jump from one value to another without passing through all the values in between.  This is what continuous means, and this is what analog means.

Digital means numbers.

Digital sound represents analog sound by writing down a bunch of numbers.  There is a certain period of time that it writes down one number every time that that time passes.  If I were measuring very very low frequency sounds (below 0.01 hertz, and no you could not hear this sound), I could do this by hand with an air pressure meter, and just write down the air pressure once every 30 seconds or so.  If I had an air pressure generator, it could be configured to play back these air pressures and it would be an approximation of this low frequency sound we're talking about.

But there's something else about this kind of measurement.  When you write numbers down, you can only write them down to a finite level of precision.  My air pressure meter might be able to tell the difference between 1.005 atm and 1.006 atm, but it  might be incapable of telling the difference between 1.005 and 1.0051 atm.  So the highest amplitude and lowest amplitude in a sound will only have a certain number of possible positions it can pass through to get from one point to another.

For Audio CDs, this kind of measurement is taken 44100 times each second, and the numbers range from 0 to 65535.  44100 is chosen because half of its value, 22.1 kHz, is approximately the upper limit of human hearing.  The thought is that in theory, no one will notice.  But some people claim they can, and so there is a market for audio at higher sampling rates, as this number is called.  The other number is called the bit-depth, but it is expressed as "16-bit" since 2 to the 16th power is 65536, which, including zero is the number of possible amplitudes.  Higher bit depth matters much less on paper than higher sampling frequency, but if you used a much lower bit-depth, like.. 4-bit, then it would be very apparent that 16-bit is probably necessary.

Anyway, that's what a CD is, it's a long list of numbers, burned into its ridges kind of like a really long circular barcode.  This list of numbers can be pretty much directly copied to your computer and put directly in a file you can play back: this is a Wave file.  Or an AIFF or possibly some other options.

 

But all of these formats, CD, wav, aiff, are all the type of digital audio we call "raw".  One number = one amplitude to get played back, implementation is relatively trivial.

Any RAW audio will take up an easy to find amount of disk space.  Sampling rate * bit depth * number of channels (2 for stereo, 1 for mono).

So for a CD: 44100 Hz * 16 bits * 2 channels = 1411200 bits per second = 176400 bytes per second = 176.4 KB/second

Only way to increase quality is to increase the sampling rate, or the bit-depth.  Only way to decrease file-size is to decrease sampling rate or decrease bit depth.  That's it.

In case you didn't know, elgaberino is hosting a Top 10 Albums of the 00s list sharing party thing.  Here is the link: .

It's a difficult process.  I don't want this to be just a list of albums I like.  This should be a list of albums that have changed the landscape of music production forever, or at least of albums that defined the character of this past decade more than any other.  They should also be good.

Not every album I pick is going to really have "changed the landscape of music production forever", but I going to try to only pick albums that brought something new and/or unique to the field.

6 albums with which I have intimate experience (was that TMI?) were obvious choices.  I'm not telling you what they are yet.  One more I added to the "for sure" pile for the hell of it.  There are 25 left.

Then there are a lot of albums that I feel like should have been ridiculously acclaimed or influential but that passed under the radar of 99% of american critics and 99.9% of american listeners because, for instance, the album is in Japanese and was only released in Japan.

There are a lot of really solid albums that are so solid that I might put them as a best album of a specific year, but are they influential enough to represent the musical contributions of a whole decade?

Also it's difficult for me to pick apart my guilty pleasures from things that are good.  I'm not putting any metal.  Metal is a dead-end culture of incest.  Metal only influences metal.  (Ok, there are exceptions.  Like Pelican.  And... uh... Pelican...)  Even though I like some of it a LOT.  The reason I'm not putting metal is the same reason I'm not putting Death Cab For Cutie.  As much as it resonates with me and is good good music, I can't say that they've pushed the envelope the same way that say... (SPOILER ALERT!) The Notwist have.

I'm also really tempted to put a screamo album that I feel like has redefined screamo, but what is with that?  It's screamo.  It hasn't bled over into the avant-pop-infested world of indie the way that noise music has.  So maybe I should put a noise music band that I feel has really encapsulated said influence.  Or maybe not.

Also, when there is only one spot left, how is it possible to compare The Microphones to The Flaming Lips.  Answer: IT ISN'T!  I put (SPOILER ALERT!) The Flaming Lips.