Rotwang

New Overdream track? Cool, listening now.

Wherever you want. Trusting your judgement is much easier than me trying to figure out how to categorise a bunch of releases I've never heard. On previous occasions the same release has been voted for in both uptempo and downtempo categories; this isn't a problem. Yes. No, post as many or as few as you want. At most 10 votes per poster in each category will be counted.

very good point. the aesthetics of "dark" are broader than some pure darkpsy fans might think The aesthetics of darkpsy are broader than some darkpsy haters might think.

I guess in the case of vinyl there just isn't the market for it. CD mixing soft/hardware exists so vinyl isn't required for DJs any more, so the question is why is vinyl still thriving in other genres? I think there are a number of reasons for that; there are audiophiles who insist they sound better, or at least sound different; there are some artists (e.g. Autechre) who have a sizeable fanbase who are willing to buy every available format to hear the difference, own the artwork or just for the sake of completeness, but psytrance doesn't have a sufficiently large and dedicated fanbase for that. And I think that there are some genres where vinyl is just fetishised because of its historical role in dance music, but psytrance fans don't really do that either.

Done.

It's time to vote for your favourite uptempo and downtempo psy albums of 2013. You can vote for up to 10 albums in each category; your first will be awarded 10 points, your second 9, and so on. Cast your vote by replying to this thread with your votes written in the following format (the label is optional, but if you can be bothered to put it in it will make counting votes easier): Uptempo: 1: Artist - Title (label) 2: Artist - Title (label) 3: Artist - Title (label) 4: Artist - Title (label) 5: Artist - Title (label) 6: Artist - Title (label) 7: Artist - Title (label) 8: Artist - Title (label) 9: Artist - Title (label) 10: Artist - Title (label) Downtempo: 1: Artist - Title (label) 2: Artist - Title (label) 3: Artist - Title (label) 4: Artist - Title (label) 5: Artist - Title (label) 6: Artist - Title (label) 7: Artist - Title (label) 8: Artist - Title (label) 9: Artist - Title (label) 10: Artist - Title (label) You have until the end of March to vote. If you change your mind after voting, don't make a new post - just edit your existing post. Also, if you reply to a post in this thread then please remove any votes from the quoted material (I will be copying and pasting the thread into an automatic vote-counting doohickey, so if votes appear twice they may be counted twice).

Sorry, nobody's got round to starting the thread yet. I'm at work right now but if nobody else has done so by the time I get home I'll do it later.

Sufi music, you say? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVCmSBuZFQ0

Could that be because it is Avangaro?

I don't know what they are, but are you sure they're from 97 and 99? They sound later.

But Amazon MP3, iTunes and Beatspace Digital all say Avangaro.

Pretty much, if my layman's understanding is correct. But the cool/scary thing is that your brain hides the moment when your eyes were out of focus by retroactively replacing it with the image it sees when the clock comes into focus. In other words your brain is continually lying to you about the passage of time. More here.

Here's a fun perception of time experiment you can do on your own: find a clock that counts seconds. Look away from it, at something that's a different distance so that your eyes refocus, then look back at the clock. If you do this a few times, you'll probably notice that sometimes the second hand/digits seem to hang on the same value for slightly longer than a second, as if the clock only starts ticking after it notices that it's being watched. Do you know why? Hint:

Nobody seems to know for sure whether that Parasense album is called Avangaro or Avangard.

So then do the experiment and post the results.

If the lens has been wiped since last year then it will have different surface ridges which will give rise to differently-shaped halos around lights. You can test this - find a cloth that's designed for cleaning glasses or lenses (don't use a regular cloth or tissue, you could damage the lens) and give it a wipe, then take some more photos. You'll probably find that the stroke of light will have changed shape again. I predict that if you wipe the lens from side to side rather than up and down then the stroke will end up vertical (though it may not if e.g. there are vertical ridges in the lens due to the manufacturing process or something). But you reject perfectly adequate explanations based on today's science. That's not open-mindedness, it's just a different kind of closed-mindedness.

Perhaps because the lens has been touched in the time between when the two sets of photos were taken? Anyway, I thought your point was that the light being bent towards you from the region where lines appear either side of the lamps was a real phenomenon, rather than just the result of lens flare, wasn't it? But if that were the case then why would the lines become vertical when you photographed them in portrait mode?

Which is what I predicted in post #27 based on my guess that the lines were caused by a smear on the lens. So it sounds like the evidence suggests that the smeared lens theory is more likely than the psychic motherboard theory, doesn't it?

No, I'm not saying that. The way it works, very roughly, is that General Relativity treats spacetime as a four-dimensional curved differentiable manifold. Time is just one of the dimesions. The manifold ends at the Big Bang, as far as we know. I'm afraid not, I learned about it from lectures as well as a few books, but I can't think of a single book that I'd really recommend as an introduction.

Because "before" usually means at an earlier time, but if time started with the Big Bang then there is no earlier time than the Big Bang.

But none of those is in portrait mode?

Sure (well kinda...), but why does it have to be continuous, rather than discrete, to progress? Well, consider the real numbers between 0 and 1, inclusive. They're continuous, in that there are no "gaps" between numbers (to be more precise they're topologically connected), but they have a start and end. I don't know what you mean by "pre-time"; note that if time started with the Big Bang then it's not really meaningful to talk about "before", since that suggests an earlier time. Why do you say that? It surely didn't. Well if it makes you feel any better, nobody completely understands time. We know what role it plays in our theories of physics, and those theories seem to work, but AFAIK there's no definite answer to the question of why we experience time the way we do, namely as something that progresses. This may turn out to be explained by the working of our brains or it may turn out that some fundamental component is missing from our understanding of physics.

Better if I don't start, I might not be able to stop.

What makes you say that? Time is continuous according to established physics, but I don't see why it has to be - can't you imagine the universe working like e.g. a cellular automaton, such as Conway's GoL? Unless you're using the word in a non-standard way, "continuous" doesn't mean "without start or end"; according to standard Big Bang cosmology time both is continuous and started at some point. Again, established physics says that the universe did come into existence, but a priori the fact that we are here doesn't mean the universe had to have come into existence - why couldn't it just have been here forever?