Tuesday Open Thread...

Argh. I just got done reading the Underworld article in the new issue of Remix, and someone needs to clean house in their proofreading department (if they even have one.) That thing is so riddled with errors that, well, it’s riddled with errors. It’s fairly sad. A sample sentence:

The 60-plus lights Cruickshank used at Central Park are mostly Robe 700s, joined by Molefay, ACL, and Par Can strobes.“

The thing with that sentence is that you’d have to have a reasonably deep knowledge of concert lighting to see the errors. That’s fine, of course. Obviously the writer isn’t a concert LD. But there’s the rub: the information is for concert LDs, who are the only ones that would find it interesting at all. Thus, it would perhaps behoove the writer to not just Make Shit Up that would necessarily cause a concert LD to ROFL.

The phrase “par can” is capitalized throughout the article; I assume that these fancy “Par Can strobes” are all the rage with the touring electronic-based progressive whatever bands. This isn’t really a big deal, but a pretty fair portion of the article, maybe 30% of the four pages, are given over to talk of lighting and video, and I’d say that roughly 30% of that information is correct. He talks about the 20-by-2-inch tubes that cover the stage for a while. Fun, when you change that “inch” to “feet,” as prominently displayed in the 2-page picture right above the paragraph they’re mentioned in.

This is the reason I find American music magazines (with the obvious exception of TapeOp) to be stupid in general. It seems that the entire point of the magazine is to provide a convenient mechanism by which to fling Sweetwater, M-Audio, and Korg advertisements at the reader. The writing is, it seems, something of an afterthought any more. I’m not bothered by the actual errors. The thing that bothers me is that if I can catch this many errors (I count 23 factual errors in the video and lighting sections of the article) in the talk of shit I know about, how many errors are there in the shit I don’t know about, and can I actually trust them as an information source?

Anyways, rant over. I’m going to Portland this evening to catch Chemlab and USSA. By virtue of the two long-ass tours I did with them, I’ve probably seen Chemlab perform more than any other band, I’d say roughly 125 times. So that’ll be a trip down memory lane. In the unlikely event you’re at the show and can manage to find me, come and say “hi” and buy me a mojito. But just one. I have to drive home.

Oh, and, the open thread topic (and this should be a hot one…): we’re coming up on the release of a couple albums at the ol’ Positron HQ, and we’re discussing the interesting fact that the only real reason to press CDs any more is for licensing houses. There’s really no question at this point that hard media as a delivery mechanism will go away. What’s the time frame? How long before a label doesn’t even have to consider CD pressing at all?