LithoJazzoSphere Roulette V1: Variety & Reciprocity (Post-Roulette Playlist)

[LithoJazzoSphere]

Ok, so over a few posts over a number of days I want to get out some post-roulette deconstruction thoughts.

Not having done one of these before, my visions in my head of how things would go and how they actually went down were rather different.  Let's just get this right out of the way...

*I'm pretty confident I can keep the pace up enough to make these breeze by.

       


Yeah, I didn't intend on having the longest non-hiatus roulette ever apparently, it just worked out that way.  When I started the roulette we were in a period where the other current roulettes were also going at a let's say "leisurely" pace, and I thought, "well, my rounds couldn't take much longer than those, right?"  If TAC and ariich were hosting the others at the time I'd likely have had different expectations.  And I did want to make it a bit more epic than normal, since I've missed out on doing years of these, and wanted to figure out sort of a way for me to kind of participate in my own roulette via the mystery songs. 

But what I quickly found out in the first few rounds is that speed probably isn't my comparative advantage.  Especially for early rounds I was trying to get in three complete listens to each set while doing nothing else other than listening and taking notes.  That proved not to be sustainable, especially for the multi-song rounds (which became the only kind of round in the second half), so I had to drop that back to just two completely undistracted listens for those (and just one for the EPs). 

I was also more enjoying the process of getting in a lot of listens total (often a dozen or more, sometimes 20 or so probably to higher-scoring ones) to see what grew on me, over time more and more research to learn about the bands and sometimes a bit about the genres they were related to especially if they were less familiar to me.  I'd often watch a music video and/or a live video if they were available, familiarized myself more with various music databases to find the ones that proved most consistently useful, etc.  And then the writeups were often fun to do, though they take more time, even as fast as I can type. 

All this did mean other hobbies mostly going on the backburner during the roulette, which is fine, I volunteered to do this.  I just need to ponder how to do a more limited version of it in a later one. 

My current thought is for a fun challenge, to try and do the complete opposite next time.  Have it be a much shorter roulette, maybe 5-7 rounds, but try to get even more participants, and intentionally try and have much shorter writeups and round turnarounds, and possibly even a linear stacked ranking possibly like lonestar's, just to make myself try it out.  The tentative title for it would be "Volume II: Celerity & Concision".  But I'll think more about it in the upcoming months. 

I have some other assorted songs that a number of you have sent or mentioned at various points that I'll listen to at some point and give a few brief comments on. 

I'll probably also post a large Spotify "best of" list at some point, with most of the songs that did or would have scored 8.25 or above, and maybe a few other salient ones that have grown on me over time. 

That's probably good for the moment, more to come later on later days. 

[Sacul]

Yeah definitely make it shorter in scope next time

Also, congrats on your 5000th post!

[LithoJazzoSphere]

A few more thoughts for today:

Next time my ban list will be much smaller (though still probably relatively large).  I went into the roulette primarily wanting artists I'd never heard of before, but over and over I discovered how much I underrated the idea of being exposed to more material from artists I'd already heard something from.  In ways it might be even more important, since sometimes the most valuable music was right under your nose the whole time, but you'd been ignoring it. 

I still like the idea of mixing submission length durations.  I'm thinking 20 minutes winds up being more useful than 15 and a less awkward time, but there are still advantages to single song rounds as well.  There are some bands that are more suited for one format than the other, as I keep noticing through participating in other roulettes.  I also like the idea of the TAC wildcard, usable once a roulette per contestant, to give one extra song to choose between. 

Not knowing about the 20k character limit was a pain all roulette long.  I kept having to move things to post #13 because I was constantly at the limit.  Saving several placeholder posts at the beginning will definitely be a priority.  Also, something like ariich's format where round playlists, impressions, results and such are all in spot is definitely much more convenient and something I'll steal next time. 

[TAC]

I also like the idea of the TAC wildcard, usable once a roulette per contestant, to give one extra song to choose between. 

Yeah, I put that in because it sucks being torn between two songs not knowing what to send. This was, for one round, why not be able to send both.

For me, I give each song ONE listen and decide. It is extremely rare that I give them two listens. It's most often an easy choice. What I've found is that generally, they are not similar songs. There's a legit submission, but the second one is usually a high risk/high reward track. People use it as a freebie....a shot in the dark. Sometimes people are quite surprised at the song I pick.

[LithoJazzoSphere]

Yeah, I wound up being surprised that you chose the track without any guitars, but maybe the bigger deal was that the other one didn't have any conventional drums. 

[LithoJazzoSphere]

Ok, I just finished curating a best of from the roulette.  One song per artist, these all did, roughly would have, or grew on me enough later to have scored about 8.5 or higher.  It could get revised slightly later, I made three tiers of interesting songs from the roulette, and there were some songs cut that are on the tier below, but it's getting pretty long as it is. 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2yUJDYkGgvluq7XgZbHZt8

[twosuitsluke]

Does it start or end with Murder of the Universe?

[LithoJazzoSphere]

Of course it ends with it, that was just assumed, no need to add it to the playlist.