CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND THE MAGIC BAND - Doc at the Radar Station (1980)

Review by: Alex Alex
Album assigned by: B.B. Fultz

Captain Beefheart (hereafter Cb) is a maker of capitalistic things: music (1), paintings (2) and poetry (3). In the Year of Water Dog, having realized (1) and (3) require an industrialized workflow which could not, at that time, be sufficiently provided by an individual, Cb retired (1) and (3) from production, concentrating solely on (2).

The object of the review is the #11 in the (1) + (3) output, consisting of 0xC entities in two groups of 6 (see Fig. 1).

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C

Fig 1. The layout of the entities.

The lengths of the entities vary from the minimum of 60000000000 to over 38039985927014 ns.

7 human beings are credited: Cb (DVV), JMT, EDF, RAW (not to confuse with JPEG), BLF, JF(D), GL.

(*) Cb plays: the reed wind instrument, a transposing instrument on which a written C sounds like B♭, a woodwind instrument with a high F# key and a range from A♭3 to E6, 鑼 and several others.

The lyrical contents of the album is, due to its analogue nature and as usual with any poetry, difficult to almost impossible to translate. For those interested, I can only give you a fragment of how it sounds to the author of this review, personally: “Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги!” which, hopefully, is instructive enough for any further attempts at the studies.

Fig. 2 presents one of the possible layouts of the human beings involved in the production of the entities.

Cb(DVV) JMT EDF RAW BLF, JF GL, JPEG

Fig 2. A possible layout of the human beings

As an addendum and following the long-established reviewing tradition we present eight random words from a single product review in the ascending order of their lengths

a to the over Vliet singer vampire because

Fig. 3 Eight random words from a single product review in the ascending order of their lengths

Fig. 4 presents the possible ratings of the product on a hypothetical 5-stars scale. Further studies seem to suggest that the same algorithm can be applied to any of the separate entities, as well.

☺ ☺☺ ☺☺☺ ☺☺☺☺ ☺☺☺☺☺

Fig. 4. The possible ratings of the product on a hypothetical 5-stars scale.

Exercises:

(1) Design a thumbs scale

(2) How does “Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги!” sound to you and your friends? Discuss in groups.

(3*) Estimate art compression boundaries if JPEG is used instead of RAW