Tastemeister wants in.

I like everything except s*** rap and boring country. My favorite genres are the blackest of metal, classical with an extreme emphasis on Opera and 20th century works (no minimalism and no post-darmstadt school noise. Favorite composers are Henze, Bartok, Prokofiev, Pizzetti, Bliss, Hovhaness, Harrison (Lou, not George), Machaut and Partch. There's more and I love em all, but these guys the most), and post-bop jazz.
Bonus points for avant-garde.

Ahh I forgot Takemitsu!

Also my favorite band is King Crimson.

Prokofiev pisses me off.
You can see the craziness in his eyes.

I see the acerbic wit. He always has this tiny, mischievous smile in every single portrait.

prokofiev, brahms and rachmaninoff are some of my favorite classical composers

how do you feel about charles mingus, whim? "the black saint and the sinner lady" is some top-tier avant-garde bebop, in my opinion

Mingus is THE big band composer after Ellington. He's actually better than Ellington in my opinion, though I'd get major flak for actually saying that and even Mingus would probably disagree himself. While Duke's music is really great, Mingus is better to me because he was a bigger experimenter compositionally than Duke, though I'll give Duke the benefit of being stuck in the swing era.

just how black are we talking

hell yeah, awesome. i'd say he's better than ellington as well, but i haven't spent a lot of time listening to ellington's compositions. i actually don't really listen to a whole lot of big band jazz but i like mingus and sun ra and gil evans and some others

i think i'm still a bit of a newbie when it comes to jazz, but my favorite style is probably hard bop. bonus points if psychedelic or avant garde, of course. the freer the better. if a huge 17-minute jam session progressively turns into harsh, off-key, crazy improvisation with noisy harmonics, i'm really into that sorta thing

some of my favorite jazz albums:
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (Also Meditations and Olé Coltrane)
Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
Herbie c*** - Sextant
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin'
Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch

i've been enjoying ornette coleman a lot recently as well

If you like Coleman, check out Cecil Taylor.


90's level production. I don't think slick production fits black metal, it's too slick. I blame blackgaze.

I think black metal with good production is fine, if it's ferocious and has good atmosphere, it's good black metal to me, however I see how it would be more "true to its roots" to have that lo-fi feel simply to go against the grain as it always has. Then again, a lot of the black metal I enjoy also incorporate other genres, thus decent production is necessary to convey all aspects of the piece.

above all others I'd say Deathspell Omega does a good job at blending crisp production with orthodox black metal arrangements. but I associate them musically with the whole new wave of dissonant machine-gun post-everything bands like Ulcerate and Mitochondrion than any of their black metal peers, even though their philosophy & M.O. is blacker than black itself

strange how the French (and French-Canadians) of all populations are so good at brutality. how the same country responsible for Les Legions Noires is also responsible for inventing blackgaze is beyond me

Signups close at 1PM EST today (that's 5.5 hours from this post). If you were hesitating, it's time to stop -- you won't be able to join once the signups close.

Sign-Ups are now closed. Kyuubit will be PMing your name to you shortly.

As a quick reminder, don't send out your albums until the 20th -- that's the delivery day. That way everybody has a good amount of time to consider their choices, and everybody receives their albums at the same time.

get excited folks

If I see "You cannot make another post so soon after your last" again I will kill someone

Anyway! All PMs are sent out now. Have a fun ten days trying to decide what to send and more importantly have fun listening to your music