About
Three Star Smash
is an independent music journal written around town in Lawrence, Kansas. (Read how Pitchfork writers imagine the home of the Jayhawks.)
With a focus on hard rock, metal, and experimental music, its mission of indeterminate length is to perpetuate the exhilaration of discovering great new music every day. And, perhaps more entertainingly, to mock without mercy horrible new music, every day.
Currently, I, Luke Rounda, write 100% of the reviews and borderline funny (or, depending on your mindset, supremely upsetting) things you keep reading on the front page. Timewasters I enjoy include dark humor; films noir; early cyberpunk literature and culture; useful gadgets and technology like microwaves, lawnmowers and computers; and all things guitar related. Most often, though, I write.
My most infamous piece is perhaps Festival Among the Rocks, a short form space opera thinly disguised as “Asteroids fan fiction.” It netted me some notoriety as “the Asteroids guy” since its publication in 1999. I’m currently working the characters and backdrop into a full-fledged novel called Where the Stone Falls.
Technology/Geek Related
Three Star Smash is made entirely on a Dell laptop dual-booting Windows XP and Sabayon Linux.
I use Fedora Core 5 as a music/video server. Certain Windows applications, such as the indispensable foobar2000 music player/organizer, have no suitable replacement on any flavor of desktop Linux. However, I like to keep a curious eye open. Currently I’m toying with the idea of trying Arch.
On a dual “music and technology” front, it’s clear that file sharing technology is becoming the wave of the future for musicians. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have already made a political splash by releasing their albums for download. It remains to be seen whether other, less fortunate bands without the same kind of brand name recognition could manage the same feat, but it’s a slow process.
As I see it, physical CDs will only truly die out as a medium for music when every band sees fit to provide a lossless (preferably FLAC) copy of their records to a music-buying public with lightning fast broadband internet.
Of course, considering that most audiophiles consider rock/pop music to be a “low fidelity” realm, and, by extension, that most rock/pop listeners are not audiophiles, it may be the generationally-degraded, fidelity-compromised MP3s on Myspace players and P2P networks that ultimately reshape the music industry from the inside out, much in the same way that VHS slew the higher-quality (but less convenient) Betamax. Will we see a day when audio CDs are exclusively for Bach and Mozart fans?
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