Put Jesus Jones on, though, and suddenly the shelves full of loaded Nerf projectile weapons, styrofoam broadswords, juggling pigs and Koosh-ball cohorts feel like the defining features of the room. The rigorous solemnity of our programming tasks, not the irrepressible music, becomes the anomaly. I don't know whether we do better work while this album is playing, but we certainly enjoy it more. Jesus Jones are the perfect band to cheer me as I work, because they're one of the few bands that remind me that technology is good for something, after all. The one of my six criteria that I still have lingering doubts about, in my current job, is whether we're really improving the world.
Progress is illusion.
Old ways are good ways. Cthulhu, Cthulhu, Cthulhu. This theory put forth, I instinctively test it against music, as I do all important theories. Much of what music technology has done, particularly the imitative developments like samplers and most synthesizers since the D-50, is to change not the nature of music but the method of making it, and much of what it's been used for, not surprisingly, has been expedience, not experimentation. You could learn to play the flute, the oboe and the kalimba, and then see which one your hook sounds better on, or you could just page through every esoteric patch on your cheap keyboard in factory order until you get one that sounds cool.