Disquiet / Marc Wiedenbaum’s compilation “Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album” — on which I was pleased & honored to be able to appear — was noticed by Cory Doctorow & written up for the enormo-e-zine BoingBoing.
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http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/05/musicians-record-alb.html. Go check it out! It’s fun reading the comments there.
Heathen Harvest posted a review of my collaboration with PBK that was put out this last Summer by Impulsy Stetoskopu
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It’s kind of a funny review. It makes it sound like PBK was knocking on my door at all hours all doe-eyed hoping for a collaboration, and I was cruelly turning him down for ten years. The actual story is that Phillip had done several mixes from sources I sent him towards the goal of a collaboration. Those mixes appear on the CD as the first, fourth and seventh tracks. I was really impressed with those mixes, and I didn’t feel originally that I could match the quality of them, and so I kinda psyched myself out. Ten years later, I snapped out of it! So it goes.
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Meanwhile, here’s the review, there are only a couple of copies left with me (here), I don’t know for sure, but PBK might have some left if I run out, regardless they’re going fast!
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Artist: Split Album / Collaboration
Title: PBK + C. Reider – Discorporate
Label: Impulsy Stetoskopu Records Poland
Genre: Drone
Track Listing:
1-7: Untitled
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Over the last decade, drone machine PBK has been trying to get the attention of C. Reider in hopes of doing some sort of musical collaboration. Alas, nothing ever came of this correspondence. But hold on there, the story’s not done at that point. Earlier this year, Reider finally responded by sending in the mail to PBK a parcel with a finished master in it that would be the building block if you like, the foundation for what has become Discorporate. PBK, the drone-meister of the indie-underground listened to the source material and liked what he heard. What fascinated him most was the mood of the music – a number of untitled mixes that were neo-psychedelic in nature; spacey, ethereal, atmospheric and very ambient-drone oriented.
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Well, PBK put in his own two cents’ worth to make it a genuine collaboration and the result is this 7-track drone-lovers wet dream. Something that will numb the mind and body. At certain points he is content with just letting the pre-programmed synthesizers do the work and just twist some knobs to tweak it just so.
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C. Reider is a man from Colorado that has been putting his own mark on the drone scene of late. Although Discorporate was recorded on Poland’s Impulsy Stetoskopu record label, Reider records his stuff for the indie label, Vuzh Records. If you go to Reider’s MySpace page you can check out for yourself what he sounds like on his own. No newcomer to the indie DIY drone scene, Reider’s got a lot of brilliant ideas flowing through his head, There again you come to that thin line between genius and madness – is he a brave new world of sound and vision or just a nut who’s warped brain has turned him into a nightmare soundtrack-making machine? Hard to tell sometimes, but the answer is definitely the former. Just take a listen to his “October22wCR-78”, the first track on his front page, profile MySpace playlist, or the following cut, “February 14 f TR-606”.
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What these guys may lack in imagination in naming their songs, they make up for with the little nuances and tics here and there throughout; because really, without a little something spicy mixed in at certain (layered) levels, the “drone” aspect of it all becomes a bit, well droll after a while. So the musical marriage of these two drone and experimental music machine-toolers reflect a future that is both enticing, ominous and right on the knife’s edge – anything can happen (and usually does).
I was pleased to read today a nice write up of one of my tracks from the Electret Quintet 4 that I have posted on my SoundCloud page… Marc Weidenbaum writes:
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…his sole instrument is an early analog drum machine, one called the TR-606, which was manufactured by the Roland corporation in the early 1980s. Reider milks the machine for all it is worth, and what’s remarkable about it isn’t just that he’s taken a tool of percussion and turned it into a tool for space music — all wandering echoes and hallucinated canyons — but how much, to fans of his other work, it is immediately of a piece with things he’s made on far different instruments on other sonic journeys he’s taken.
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Read the entire article here:
Downstream, December 4, 2009
SoundCloud: Vuzh Does TR-606 Space Music
The first review of the PBK / C. Reider collaboration CD “Discorporate”
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Written by Todd Zachritz of Goat’s Den:
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Ten years (off and on) in the making, this 7-track, 46-minute collaboration between drone composer C. Reider and abstractionist PBK is a curious and immersive set of noisy, textured, alien soundscapes, with a very proto-industrial feel. Beginning with the befuddling, loopily surreal opener (we’ll call it ‘Track 1’), the album gels into a far-out set of abstracted sounds, textures, and sound collages. Track 4 is a densely-collaged mass of squelch and what sounds like manipulated and layered field recordings. Track 5 is more woozy, like waking up from a horrible anesthesia experience with your head spinning and throbbing. Track 7 wakes from the dream to a lilting, ambient journey at the beach, complete with what seems like distant waves and seagulls (or was I imagining that? Didn’t hear it the second time through). It’s a fitting conclusion to an otherwise disorienting journey, and a marvelous one, at that.
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http://www.vuzhmusic.com/releases/discorporate.html
If you happen to be up during the middle of the night tonight, (I’m being USA-centric with that statement, I know!) you might tune in to the Stillstream Radio station.
The program NTNS (Not the Normal Shit) is going to be featuring the second installment of the Electret Quintet.
The program starts at 1 AM mountain time, 2 AM Central Standard time.
As for me, I’m going to sleep through it and catch the archival recording later, but hey, I don’t know your sleeping habits. Statistically, there have got to be a few vampires that read this blog, so if one of you is reading this now, make plans to tune in tonight!
ne quid nimis has been unavailable for a very long time, nearly a decade. I’m happy to have it available again, even with its flaws… so many things I might do differently now!
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By the time I released ne quid nimis I was in flux between being a mail artist and being a musician. I had already recorded all of the ENDT material, and later the Luster material that became the not named cassette… and I had conducted the mail art/sound art project “GRIME: the secret content of the abandoned roadside tapes”. I’d also used my new 4-track which I’d bought from a guy who was in naram sin to finish up a collaboration with Dr. Terrence 13 called the Unseelie Court. Side note: Dr. 13 is now a puppeteer (youtube channel here).
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So this record was more or less my fourth main musical undertaking… maybe attaching a number in a sequence is not entirely accurate, I had been playing with recorded sound since my teens, now and again, whenever I could!
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This was the first musical project that I felt that I had complete control over. Much of the previous work had been in collaboration… Even the Luster tape, essentially solo work, was recorded and engineered by a guy who later went on to be a “real” recording engineer. It felt strange for me having someone else recording and engineering for me, and even if I had no idea how to record music by myself, it felt much more natural to explore sounds with the intimacy of one man and his tape recorder.
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What I didn’t have was focus. I recorded a bunch of stuff and didn’t really have any idea of sticking it all together as an “album”. I guess I was more into conducting audio ‘research’. I made mix tapes for my friends of the things I was working on, but for some reason an official “album” type release hadn’t occurred to me.
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Carl Howard of AudioFile Tapes (now an internet radio DJ here) was a huge encouragement for me at this time, I might not have put this record out at all if it hadn’t been for him. I owe him much gratitude! I don’t remember what he told me, it may have just been “put together all your good stuff on one tape and give it to me and I’ll put it out on my label.” That’s probably all I really needed, though!
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Carl’s impressive tape label was sadly lost due to a massive computer crash sometime in the latter nineties. I think this was a great loss to the whole underground. I’m pretty sure he had released about 200 tapes by the likes of Maeror Tri, Ed Ka-Spel, Jim O’Rourke, Klimperei, the Drowningbreathing, Swinebolt 45… some of those guys even have Wikipedia pages now!
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Anyhow, I thought it might be fun, since this release is so absolutely ANCIENT to write a commentary on this release song by song, so I’ll be making a few more posts as the days go by about each track on the release. I might have more to say about some tracks than others, but if you like this release, you might have some fun reading my memories of making it.
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more to follow…
… kind of cruddy review from Vital Weekly of the Electret Quintet, part one:
C. REIDER – THE ELECTRET QUINTET (PART ONE) (MP3 by Vuzh Music)
Of course we learned to appreciate the work of C. Reider as one of those drone meisters with lots of online releases. Here however he seems to be moving into a different direction. This is part one of a series of five, dealing with ‘experimental explorations of the textures and sounds of analogue drum machines’. Two drum machines are used here, the Roland TR-808 and the Roland TR-727. There are fed through sound effects, computers perhaps and still operate in a rhythmic manner, although Reider doesn’t want to classify his material as ‘industrial, IDM, minimal-techno and noiseambient’. I must admit I had a hard time with this. None of the five tracks here worked very well. It seemed to me that Reider more or less freely improvised on his drum machine, and let the sounds slip into delay and reverb as well as some other sound effects, but none of the tracks were interesting enough to be played again. There is a strong lack of tension and structure in these pieces and it marches on end, even when the pieces aren’t very long. I sense there is more to this, and Reider hasn’t taken the material to its full capacity yet. Very close to a ‘start’ and very far away from a ‘finish’. (FdW)
I can’t really complain. I myself wrote reviews for a time, so I know what a thankless, and downright difficult task it is to listen and come up with something interesting to say about music releases one after another. Sure it’s kinda sad to have someone get down on what you’ve done, but that’s what you open yourself up for when you submit something to critique.
I am a little surprised that from the same reviewer, I got a pretty favorable review of Fine Failures” which is a.) similar in style to the Electret Quintet, b.) longer in length by thirty minutes and c.) I personally felt unsure about the strength of the work.
I guess you never can tell what people are going to think.
I don’t feel all that bad because his critiques are actually pretty accurate… this IS kind of an improvisatory work in some senses, it’s exploratory and experimental in the real sense, I’m really screwing around trying to find out what works, and doing so in public. I also think the work treads a dangerous line between “beat” music and “experimental” music, falling into a grey area that might set up expectations one way or another which can not be fulfilled.
I also don’t think the series really gels until the third part. (MAN, I can’t wait to get that far into these releases!)
Again, I don’t mean to complain or protest… I really do appreciate the review, I appreciate that he took the time to really listen in order to give a review that’s honest. The bad review also resulted in a lot of website hits, so I almost think there’s not really such a thing as a “bad” review anyway…
Looks like the Electret Quintet, part one made it to Not the Normal Shit radio’s best of 2008…
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Here’s a link to the radio show featuring the best tracks from the last quarter of ’08.
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Yay!
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Also, some random guy listed “Fine Failures as one of the best albums of 2008 on the Rotten Tomatoes forum: here.
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Heck, maybe I’ll never make Brainwashed’s list of the year, but at least I occasionally catch the attention of the “some random guy”‘s of the world!