I’ve owned pzizz for a year and half now. I’m not a big user of pzizz - sometimes I’ll use it twice in a week to get to sleep, but then I’ll go months without thinking about it. In particular, middle-of-the-day “naps” are pretty rare. There was a time when I did sneak out to my car once or twice during work to see how that would go, but I don’t have a nap habit. Overall, I like it, but I’m a little concerned about some of the pseudo-science included in the product.
pzizz appealed to me because I have occasional fits of insomnia, and I’m also interested in taking sleep seriously. You can’t glean much about their product from their wikipedia page, but they’ve been enthusiastically endorsed by Merlin and Gina. The people who put pzizz together appear to share my enthusiasm for sleep, so I was happy to support their work.
It basically just generates audio files. They sell the modules that can generate either daytime “energy” naps or night-time “sleep” soundtracks for $30 each, but it’s $50 for both, and the authors don’t appear to want to branch out into new kinds of modules. The soundtracks, then, are mixes of music, effects, and a guy who talks gently. (We’ll get to the guy.) You don’t have a ton of options beyond how long the program is and the balance of background / guy. You can play the program immediately, export it to iTunes, or generate a file to be burned to CD. You’re supposed to listen to “energy” during the day (although I’m not sure if you’re supposed to actually sleep - there is an alarm at the end in case you do), or “sleep” as you fall asleep for the night.
The background noise is nice: pretty traditional relaxation stuff, with oceans, new-age synth melodies, and jungle noises. I’ve created soundtracks with no guy at all, and burned CDs for the kids. (They didn’t latch on to the idea.) The sound effects as the program goes on are less busy, and this is probably where the program uses brainwave entrainment - binaural beats, claimed by others to be useful in meditation, learning, boosting creativity, and relaxation. Others are skeptical. I imagine the effect is most pronounced if you’re using headphones with the primary audio source, but I’ve read elsewhere that the digital frequencies get all jumbled when the program is transferred to CD, so I’m sure the compression to MP3 ruins the magic, too. It is relaxing, and it’s nice that you can generate another mix when you get conditioned / bored with the one you burned.
My main issue might be the guy. I do find him relaxing: he says that things are really great, if they aren’t already, and reassures you that sleep is inevitable. That’s positive. But he also says things in kind of a stilted way, introducing pretty sensible observations with long-winded clauses that don’t necessarily put my mind at ease. Like, “it’s always a good idea to find a position for yourself that’s comfortable right now.” That’s a gentle, soothing way to say “get comfortable”, but it doesn’t make any sense. He also says things like “dreams are just dreams, they aren’t real…” which is, as far as I’m concerned, creepy.
Why does he go on like that? Because he’s trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming. NLP is another shadowy pseudo-scientific discovery, embraced by life coaches and self-helpers. (It’s about programming your brain with positive lanuguage patterns, but publicly available details about it get very sketchy / contradictory after that.) It’s possible, I suppose, that the people responsible for pzizz just thought NLP-tuned chat and encouragement would be pleasing in their product, but it’s certainly also a possibility that pzizz started its life as a method for delivering NLP-based self-help under the guise of taking more naps. It would be great if pzizz’s documentation or support site addressed any of this, but it doesn’t.
I don’t want to come across as a critic of pzizz. It’s a good product. I don’t want to say that binaural beats don’t encourage relaxation, sleep, or promote healthy brainwaves in the night, but I’m pretty skeptical about that. I’m very skeptical about NLP, and I’d love to know more about why pzizz is associated with it. And I worry that there’s not a discussion of these topics online, aside from the skeptical chat about the two separate features.
I don’t know how it happened, but I suppose a lot of people reading this blog aren’t huge Rocket From the Crypt fans. It’s possible you never got into the phenomenally talented side-project of John Reis, Hot Snakes, or the really fun pure punk off-shoot, The Sultans. Here’s what I’m going to guarantee with the Night Marchers record: it will have RFTC front-man John Reis on vocals, it will have a Hot Snakes-like sound, you will find it about twice as accessible and mature as the other bands I’m writing about here, and it will make your summer about four times as fun as it would have otherwise been.
This album was out earlier in 2007, but I kind of missed it. By September, I was saying something about Tomahawk to Cratchit, and he told me that the drummer from Helmet was in Battles, and had I heard it yet? Something about “electronic, unstructured, but with John Stanier from Helmet” hadn’t quite sold me yet. But fast forward beyond how mind-blowing I thought it was (guitars don’t sound like guitars, effects don’t sound like effect, vocals don’t sound like vocals): playing this in the car, Adam (then 4) started telling me which songs he liked, despite the fact that a lot of these tracks don’t have lyrics and switch tempos and take an approach to melody I would describe as, well, advanced beyond Jack’s Big Music Show. But anyway. My mom also demanded that I burn her a copy, so this is instrumental- sample-heavy- experimental- prog- metal with appeal for preschoolers and their grandmothers.
Don’t get me wrong - I love new Queens of the Stone Age. Kind of. I mean, if you’re going to do modern hard rock, they are doing it about as well as anyone can. And they’re critically adored, draw great press, sell a ton of records, and put on a pretty mean show. But two albums in, they’d already shown that they could master anything they’d put their mind to. It’s just that they’d decided to master goofy psychedelic metal that was way too smart for its own good. I think there’s a ton to like in the three records they’ve put out since, but this is my absolute favorite.
“So listen, baby. Listen. That new Breeders record? I don’t know. It was just aight, dawg. There were times that it was reminding me of when Kim Deal was really killin’ it, like on The Amps record from 1995.”
“Pacer” was all over the map: sloppy, uneven, but using that dreamy dynamic to somehow achieve punchy and fun. I never liked the Breeders as much as I liked this band, and when they finally reformed to put together their last two records at an Axl-like pace, it wasn’t the same.
* This record doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon MP3s, but there are thousands of copies in used CD bins, since, apparently, they were anticipating Breeders-level interest in this, and buyers stayed away in droves.
We tried to get them into Dance Dance Revolution maybe two months ago, and they had no interest at all. I mean, interest, I suppose, but not the motivation to follow the rules or anything like that.
Honestly, the Onion AV Club just reviewed “Pretty. Odd.” last week, and I picked it up out of curiosity. I had a ton of admiration for their first record (two years ago?) and their surprise win for Best Video (18 months ago?), but never really thought of them as a favorite band of mine. I have to go back to their first record and make sure I didn’t miss something - this new one is amazing. They’ve pitched some electro-diddling to pick up a hearty chunk of 60’s psychedelic rock and 70’s AM jams, but it’s the Sgt. Pepper’s tribute done exactly right. I’m sorry if you’ve been inundated with “Nine in the Afternoon” lately, but it’s one of maybe five insanely catchy songs on the record.
You found the blog. Some people get here without coming through the front page - that's totally cool, I just wanted you to be aware that it's like a whole page full of sidebars and content you won't necessarily find here. So now you know.
