Vuzh Music Blog

The large compilation on Vuzh Music called “The More Unknown C. Reider” has been a very revealing way for me to observe the processes of some of the composers and artists that I count among my peers and comrades in the musical underground. How does a composer approach and utilize a sound? This question is very interesting to me. Each of the artists who contributed their work to the compilation were tasked with selecting sounds that I had authored over the course of my creative life and assembling them into new shapes & forms. Since the original sounds were so familiar to me, I had a unique perspective for attempting to understand how each artist chose which sounds to use and how to use them. This kind of analysis is fascinating to me, and is part of the way I listen to music in general, aside from pure holistic enjoyment.
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A few of the contributing composers have made this analysis more accessible by having written some descriptions of their processes and thoughts about their own work. I’ve read each of these with consideration, and I recommend reading them!
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Steve Burnett of Subscape Annex talks about working with the entire Drone Forest album .Point, on his cleverly titled “Qutub” which appears on part 3 of the compilation. He includes a screenshot of his multitracker during his working process at his LiveJournal post.
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Perennial internet pal LokiLokust of Keziah Mason talks about how he forged that swirling electronic maelstrom that appears on part 3 of the compilation by extracting sounds from the run-in & run-out grooves and physical manipulation of my vinyl release “Amy’s Arms / metacollage” in his tumblr post.
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Dave Seidel of Mysterybear described his use of a tiny fragment of Noam Chomsky’s voice from my 2008 release “Linguism” at a CSound forum.
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John Ingram from Intelligent Machinery suggests that he secretly and pseudonymously contributed to the comp at his blog.
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Comrade & peer Robert Nunnally, a.k.a. Gurdonark provides a thoughtful and accurate analysis of my music before discussing his own music and his piece “Where” on his blog.
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A few quotes from that last one:

Perhaps the unifying thread of his varying music is that rather than being “music-as-sound” in the ambient formulation, it is “sound-as-music”. The sounds are interesting, and somehow, a bit improbably, they add up to music. His pieces rarely cause one to float away on a sea of melody, nor do they paste one against the wall in the way of noise. They happen in their own little created universe, aware of but not entombed in anyone else’s universe, and they are their own thing. I listen to C. Reider music for some of the same reasons I read science fiction–it offers me a kind of escape into different ideas, all served up with a kind of unpretentious earnest grace.

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From his vantage point as a listener, Robert has gleaned some of my own working processes and goals and summarized them very astutely in this paragraph.
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This kind of listening can be very rewarding. Are you listening?

Although there is a little bit of info to pass on regarding new Vuzh Music stuff, I wanted first to delve into something I think is important about underground music. I was commenting recently to Thomas Park about how I find it odd that underground musicians don’t talk each other up very much. Everyone always talks about ‘me, me, me’. This is understandable on a certain level: underground musicians, or as we used to call them “hometapers” don’t have an advertising budget, and so many people will only ever hear about them through word of mouth, and since underground musicians rarely talk about other underground musicians, they all have to talk themselves up to an annoying degree.

This post, and this blog on the whole will occasionally point out some things I have found around the internet that I enjoyed, and maybe you will also. Clearly this will not stop me from talking about ‘me, me, me’ but it’s a start.

• Petal – the Pharisee, I heard a track from this album on Stillstream radio, otherwise I don’t know anything about this artist. The album is a fine work of pulsing drone ambient, quite pretty indeed. There seemed to be something wrong with the last two tracks and with the .zip file, but the rest of the files downloaded alright.
• Siegmar Fricke – Atemkalk. I don’t know anything about this artist, I found it via a promotional post on the ‘Experimentals’ LiveJournal community. The album is a fine, pleasant bit of gritty, swirling drone music.
• Delicious Dragon. This is a MySpace page set up by friend and peer John Gore of Cohort Records. He’s recorded ambient, avant-garde, experimental and space music for decades… and now steps out tentatively into making music with beats and melody, and… it’s pretty cool stuff.
• Velveeta Heartbreak – Future Grot. Michael J. Bowman, a friend of mine and co-member of Drone Forest, has posted on his blog a free download of “Future Grot”, a collage-like compilation of previously released musical weirdness, pop music and skronky instrumentals. Very enjoyable stuff.
• Subscape Annex – Singing Glasses. Steve Burnett, a.k.a. Subscape Annex, has posted a new thirteen minute long work where he tries to imitate the sound of the glass armonica using a Chapman Stick fed through several processors. The effect is convincing, and the piece is very calming.
• Martin Taxt – Various Improvisations. My wife found this piece while digging around the internet. I like it quite a bit. The three short pieces utilize the tuba as a sound source, but the artist plays the de-constructed bits of the instrument, blowing through them and hitting them together.