Vuzh Music Blog

… 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…