The Fredösphere

Colby Cosh likes -- or at least, fails to hate -- the music recommendation service at Pandora.com.  (Actually, it does more than recommend music -- it also streams it on your own personal "station.")  He says it succeeds in leading you deeper into your pet niches, unlike amazon.com, which always flogs the latest best sellers, or LivePlasma, which thinks Perry Como is the logical next step for lovers of early music choirs.  I'll give Pandora a try if it ever adds classical music to its library; I've used Movielens with success, but I've never found a Beatrice to guide me through the seven labyrinthine circles of recorded music Hell.

Me:  "Do tell, fair and thrice-beatified Beatrice, would I like this latest release by The Bad Mutha Tulips?" 
Beatrice:  "Naw.  Sucks."

(The Bad Mutha Tulips comes compliments of the Band Name Generator.)

Speaking of which, (early music, not The Bad Mutha Tulips) I returned today to The Sixteen.  What delicious singing.  The CD cover titles say:

An Eternal Harmony
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers

This implies the forming of the group involved searching the globe for sixteen men each of whom was a superb singer and also happened to be named Harry Christopher.  Which, if it were true, would be just the kind of admirable yet quixotic quest that you would expect a group of early music fanatics to impose upon themselves -- like continuing a search for the Holy Grail even after you had seen photographic proof it was placed in a Whole Foods recycle bin and melted down to make containers for organic tomato colonics.