Reviews
You will notice very quickly that the reviews in Asymmetry are mostly positive, and you may wonder if you can trust any of them if they’re all simply praise. Well, I hope first that they’re more than praise; that they describe, accurately enough to let you know if any particular cd is one you’d enjoy. Otherwise, for the most part, unless a reviewer likes a cd, it won’t be reviewed. What that means, in practice, is that if one reviewer doesn’t like a cd, it will be up to another reviewer to talk about it. If no one likes it, it won’t be reviewed. There will be many exceptions to this. One frequent exception will be multiple performances of the same piece—if we like the piece, but we hate the performance, we’ll warn you of the performances that stink. There won’t be a lot of that, though, as the bulk of what we review are one-offs—electronic music of some sort, a single performance of an instrumental piece, a recording of indeterminate music or of improvisation. Another common exception will occur when we don’t particularly like a piece by a composer that we do like.