Scott Rickard is a mathematics professor at Dublin College. He also has a keen interest in music, which makes sense, as the two fields have some common points of interaction.

Repetition is a common trait to all music. I'm not just talking about Philip Glass and his tedious 2-hour arpeggio exercises; recurring patterns, no matter how tenuous, can be found in even the most complex music. It's hardwired into our brains somewhere. 

As an experiment, Rickard endeavored to write a piece of music "devoid of any pattern," one in which there's no repetition whatsoever. He's not the first to try this. Schoenberg and …

On this day in 1957, Jimmy Smith began recording a series of sessions that would be compiled as The Sermon!

The first song recorded was "J.O.S." (for "Jimmy Oscar Smith").  It's a fast-moving 32-bar blues buoyed by Smith's deft pedalwork and Donald "Duck" Bailey's drumming.  Though Bailey would be replaced by the unstoppable juggernaut Art Blakey in subsequent sessions, he's a great fit for this setting.  Kenny Burrell is magnificent on the guitar, but the real shock is the trumpet work of Lee Morgan, who was 19 years old at the time of the recording.

Morgan is brash and cocky, and what's more, he's got the talent to get away with it.  At 6:24, you can hear his solo running well past the chorus.  Smith stabs a dissonant chord to signal him, and Morgan's either blowing too hard to notice or he feels like mischief.  In either case, it's a dose of humor that fits right in with the informal feeling of the record.

Justin Vernon's first album under the Bon Iver moniker was the unlikely product of a ruined relationship, a battle with mononucleosis, and a self-imposed hermitage in the northern woods of Wisconsin.  It was a sparse, ramshackle record that was by turns confessional and willfully obscure.

Coming as something as a surprise, For Emma, Forever Ago was also quite successful.

The self-titled sophomore record replaces some of the intimacy with a grander cinematic sweep, but Vernon's artistic voice is still much the same.  In "Holocene," he insists that "I was not magnificent," just before the song kicks in and proves him quite wrong.  Magnificence on a humble scale is how Bon Iver operates, and the addition of a judiciously placed, and sometimes unorthodox, ensemble helps convey that.

It always gets worse.

By now, you've likely heard "Friday" by Rebecca Black.  It's easy to criticize on any number of levels.  It's vapid.  It's an idol farm's vanity project to to milk rich parents of their money.  It's overproduced to the point of sterility.  The singer's voice is so saturated by pitch correction that it sounds like fingernails being raked across a blackboard.

In short, it's everything that's wrong with pop music.  But it's also the new normal.  For all the mocking and vitriol, everyone's heard it.

Last fall, Seefeel showed up out of the blue to perform new material at Warp's 20th Anniversary concert. An EP titled Faults was released shortly thereafter.

This came as something of a surprise, as I hadn't heard anything from them since 1996. It's hard to grasp that it's been 17 years since I first heard them on the astounding Pure, Impure EP.

Lots of things from that period sound pretty dated. Surprisingly, Seefeel's output doesn't.

If you recognize that quote, you're a Rush geek like me.  If not, I really can't help you.

There may be no other band in popular music that has so sharply illuminated the divide between critics and normal folks.  On one hand, cool guys like Robert Christgau and JD Constantine despise them.  On the other, they've sold 40 million records and they continue to fill arenas worldwide.

If it were my career, I'd take the opinion of millions of loyal fans over some guy who gets paid to write witty boilerplate any time.  I've always wondered how the guys in Rush felt about all this, and now we've got the answer.

Beyond the Lighted Stage is a documentary produced by the same guys who did last year's great Iron Maiden film.  For a band that's been around for nearly four decades, it's well past time we got something like this.

And fortunately, it's marvelously done.

Only three months, and we've got the EP to accompany Oversteps.  Thank goodness Bleep is doing American distribution.  With the dollar the way it is, this would have been about $623.95 if I'd ordered it from England.

No record is worth that much unless it has Tiny Tim.  We've got a recession going here, and we have to hitch a ride with the Russians just to get into orbit these days.  I mean, really.  One has to have priorities.

But, is it worth ten bucks?  Definitely.

As usual, I never know what to expect from a new Autechre record.  The fact that the Designers Republic was back on board for artwork should have been something of a clue.

This is certainly the most consistent and approachable that they've been in years.  The record is restrained and focused, and there's a real emphasis on melody.  They've jettisoned the hyper-abstraction and claustrophobic mixing of Untilted, and the disjointed chaos of Quaristice has been reined in.  What's left is an album that doesn't convey the need to prove anything.

It's all the more satisfying for that.

This is a patient record with a unified character.  There's a sense of space and breathing room that's quite welcome.  The atmosphere is reminiscent of Envane's quieter moments and several tracks lack percussion entirely.

Before everyone starts screaming, "OMG ambient record!  They remade Amber FTW," bear in mind that this is a more mature animal.  It's learned a few things since then, and its teeth are a bit sharper than they were fifteen years ago.

I doubt there's ever been a piece of music that's had as much of an effect on my life as Revolver.  Never mind that it was recorded half a decade before I was born.  In fact, I wouldn't hear it until the early 1980's, when the survivors of the "psychedelic culture" supposedly inspired by this record had gone on to become corporate raiders and investment bankers.

According to some sources, the Beatles were somewhat influential on musical trends and cultural movements in the late 1960's.  I wasn't around for that, and I couldn't have cared less.  What attracted me to them was the sheer talent they had, and the quality of their output, which has never been matched.

Like just about everyone else, I've heard their early output all my life.  It's hardwired into our cultural DNA.  I wasn't as familiar with their middle-period input until a friend gave me a copy of Revolver.  It was the old Capitol mono mix, and I'd end up literally wearing it out as I pored over every minute detail month after month.  To this day, I know every note and nuance of the record.

With this record, the Beatles had gone from catchy pop band to true artists and innovators.  We take many of the studio techniques they used for granted today, but on Revolver, they were revolutionary.  More to the point, they were judiciously used to complement a suite of nearly perfect songs.

Then 1987 came, and I got to hear the record in stereo when their catalog was issued on Compact Disc.  To say the least, I was disappointed.  I imagine that the CD masters were what George Martin thought people expected, but I found them to be harsh, brittle and completely sterile.

We'd be stuck with those for another twenty years.

I've been involved with music most of my life.  I don't recall when it began, but I can clearly remember first hearing Giant Steps and the Bartok quartets.  Once in a great while, a piece of music will give me an epiphany as strong as the first pangs of love, something majestic and transcendent.

From adolescence on, I set about trying to create something that could generate that sort of reaction.  I think I came close a few times.  In one medium or another, I think we all get that chance a few times in our lives.

Neko Case certainly has.  Several times, she's nailed it perfectly.

I was absolutely smitten with Chris Clark's 2006 album, Body Riddle.  It didn't grab me immediately, but with time, it grew to be one of my favorite records released that year.

Last year's Turning Dragon left me a bit cold.  The reclusive genius of previous records had become quite the extrovert for a change.  Much of the abstraction and complexity of his previous worked had been toned down in favor of more danceable, and dare I say, sunny material.

So, with Totems Flare, I had no clue which way he'd go.  Turns out he went both ways at once, and with striking results.

I'm not a fan of the man's music, but there's no denying he had talent. He released the highest-selling record in history. I doubt there is a person alive who doesn't know who he was.

Nor will I speak for his mistakes and possible misdeeds. For a time, he deliberately fostered a surreal public image, and though he stopped doing so in the 1990's, his eccentric persona would continue to haunt him through the rest of his life. There's no doubting he made some poor choices.

But that's not the point. We all watched this terrified, lonely, shell-shocked man disintegrate over the last two decades, and we were entertained. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.