My personal favorite of the Electret Quintet series so far…
Electret Quintet part three is now free to find its way in this world:
Electret Quintet 3
Looks like I didn’t make that personal deadline of getting “Electret Quintet 3” out in April! Ooops. It IS ready though, and it will come out very soon. I’m excited about it because it’s my favorite of the 5 part series… although I like the others also.
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However, I did just upload the final track from “Electret Quintet 3” to my MySpace page: myspace.com/vuzhmusic… you ought to find it right at the top of the player.
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… and if you would like to check out the first two installments of the series, navigate over to the Electret Quintet page at Vuzh Music dot com, the same page where you’ll later find the third release available for free download.
A track from the Electret Quintet II appears on the Winter version of NNTS06… a collection of the ‘best of’ Not The Normal Shit Radio as selected by the show’s host Mark Stolk. The show is broadcast on Stillstream.
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I’m grateful for the inclusion, my track sits alongside such talents as Celer, Die Minimalistin, AAGSF and others.
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These comps are a great way to discover new artists.
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!
My creative work precedes my mixdown / mastering work by a large gap of time, normally.
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I’ve recently begun mixing and mastering for the Electret Quintet part 3, work which was composed and assembled in March 2008.
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After a working through a few passes at a mixdown over the last few weeks, today I found — nested in the folder for one of the tracks to appear on the third part of this project — a folder titled ‘alt’, which contained a radical remix of that track… I haven’t heard this mix in over a year, and I’d completely forgotten about it! Pretty exciting discovery, for my part. The downside is that adding this new part in will add another couple of minutes to the total length, and I was already thinking it was reaching the limit of lengthiness. The first two tracks alone have a longer duration than the entirety of “The Electret Quintet part 2”.
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It’s funny to me that the creative side of my psyche works quickly enough that I can record something and completely forget that it even exists. I wonder how much stuff I’ve created and then misplaced forever?
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Didn’t the Residents record something that they intended to have released only once they’d forgotten they’d ever recorded it? That’s a good m.o., IMO.
… 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…
In the waning days of 2008, I accomplished a goal… with a little noodling on an old dusty BOSS Dr. Rhythm, and a lot of editing, I finished the last of the tracks for the Electret Quintet, which I’d really wanted to complete before the end of the year. Each piece is named after the day that most of the basic work on it was done, and I guess I thought it would be kinda lopsided if one or two pieces were done in ’09. There are now 25 pieces in total, five will appear on each of the five releases. Only one piece ended up being in 5/4 time… I should have played around with time signatures more.
Frankly I’m happy the project is complete. It was a great project, I learned a lot from having done it, and I’m very happy with and proud of most of the work. That said, I am really ready to move on. I don’t think I could push the concept any further given my current setup.
I’ll still have some mixing and a lot of mastering to do. I’ve only just begun the mastering process for volume two in the series. I hope to get the series completely released during 2009. Once it’s all out I might solicit some remixes… that could be fun.