I’ve begun work on a second collaboration with Tarkatak this weekend. Some of the work I’ve come up with so far sounds pretty good. I just hope this one doesn’t take three years to be completed, like the last time we collaborated!
I am the DJ I yam what I yam.
Don’t turn around no, don’t turn around.
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Uh. Here’s a mix I did of some minimal techno, and industrial, and other stuff, some of which informed my Electret Quintet project. I hope you like it.
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Electret mix by vuzhmusic
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You can download the whole thing at 320kbps at the Soundcloud page for this mix:
http://soundcloud.com/vuzhmusic/electret-mix
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).
Given yesterday’s post about the best free downloadable albums of 2009 I should also make mention of a couple of incredible albums that came out last year that aren’t free, and you can’t download. Both I list here are by underground artists, if you choose to buy them, you’ll be buying from the artist directly, and you’ll be making the world a better place, not to mention giving yourself the gift of some great music.
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Michael J. Bowman – Psychic Borderland
Unequivocally one of my absolute favorite albums of the year. Brimming with a kind of hallucinatory melancholy coupled with catchy hooks, this album could be compared with Grandaddy’s better work, but that just doesn’t do the thing any kind of justice. On this album you’ll hear beautifully textured, potent, heart-tugging, sculptural songs and even one seventeen minute long technicolor scrambled egg trip down the hellhole worthy of comparison to Nurse With Wound. The kind of imaginative recording on display here should reap Mike some kind of award. If I had one I’d fuckin’ give it to him. Congratulations Mike, aside from that one Beatles remaster I bought, this is hands down my favorite pop music of the year.
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Mystified – Pulse Ringer Pieces
Mystified on vinyl. Do I need to say any more? I’m actually not sure I could add to the review I did back in January other than to say that I listen to vinyl a lot, and this lovely blue record found it’s way onto my turntable quite a lot during this last year.
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If I were made of money, I’d buy both of these for everyone reading this. But I’m not, and they’re really not very expensive so I hope you’ll buy them. Do it for me!
You know how you’re like a netlabel and stuff, and you release some new recording, and you can see from your stats that only one guy listened to it? I might have been that guy!
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Here were my favorite netlabel releases of 2009, all are freely downloadable, so maybe YOU can be hit number TWO on someone’s statcounter!
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1. Gurdonark – Seven Virtues
At a time when it would have been much more fashionable to put out an album dedicated to the seven deadly sins featuring dark and gloomy doom sounds, this charming collection of light musical fancies celebrates what’s to be admired about the human spirit. (some of Gurdonark’s thoughts on making this album)
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2. Hannah M.G. Shapero (a.k.a. Altocumulus) – My Name is Marietta Cashman
Not many of us can claim to have recorded experimental music on a Buchla modular synthesizer in the late sixties when merely an adventurous teenager, but Hannah Shapero can. Culled from forgotten tape reels, unheard for 40 years, this treasure of naive noodling sounds fresh and innocent, a stark contrast to modern noodles by hipster cognoscenti. At the moment the accompanying photo of Hannah was taken in 1970, in her futuristic silver jumpsuit and glasses in front of the synth modules, she looks like she may have been the coolest nerdy girl in the universe. Modern Noodles by Hipster Cognoscenti would make a damned fine band name.
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3. Mystified – Collusion (with PBK, the Implicit Order, KR-Ohm & Kwalijk) – A collection of guys I admire working with sound sources provided by another guy I admire. This is a collection of the kinds of sounds I love, loopy and squiggly and gritty and crunchy. Quietnoise of the highest order!
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4. Various Artists – No-R-Mal
Oh, hullo! What’s this? FIVE FUCKING HOURS of top notch weirdness from 50 underground artists? I keep coming back to this and finding new gems all the time. Stunning.
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5. Chubby Wolf – Meandering Pupa
A brief collection of smooth ambience, dancing slowly, exactly in-between light and dark. The prolific artist behind Chubby Wolf, Dani Baquet-Long, (also one half of celebrated ambient artists Celer) passed away in July, suddenly, at the age of 26. The entire underground network was saddened by the loss.
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6. Pavonine – Pavonine
Dark, vaporous, mysterious, alluring? Sure, all that and more.
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7. Dexp Lab – Sectors LP
A fine collision of rhythm and noise.
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8. PBK – Asmus Sources (plus pretty much everything else on soundgenetic)
I have to admit, somewhat embarrassedly, that when I bought the Asmus Tietchens / PBK collaboration from Realization way back in the early nineties, it didn’t entirely gel for me. I loved both artists apart, but this album just didn’t quite get there. This year, PBK released the sound source files that he originally sent to Asmus for their collaboration, and upon hearing these imagination-pricking sounds, I decided a re-evaluation of the actual collaboration was in order, and now I find that it all makes sense. I’m not at all sure what I was thinking back in the 90s. I may simply not have been mature enough to get it! Now, I love both the collab, and these raw, stripped down sources equally. This is a rare chance to compare and contrast the working methods of two great minds in abstract music.
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9. Olifaunt – Three Crows Become Four
Slow growing drone ambient with stringy textures and melancholy tones.
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10. Zondagmorgen – La Fin du Monde
So apparently the end of the world is slow, blurred and extremely melancholy. The world ends with us gazing at our shoes. Alright then.
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Don’t forget to also check out my blog post about all the stuff I did this decade, including my own big project for 2009, the Electret Quintet.
Electret Quintet 5 Released today!
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I hope you’ll spend a little of what remains of this decade, and a lot of the new one with these sounds! My major project of the last two years is now complete and released, with the fifth and final part of the Electret Quintet seeing release on the last day of the Zeroes!
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For these five sets of five recordings each, I used a single analogue drumcomputer for all of the sounds. Here’s a track using only the Roland TR-606 from Electret Quintet 4:
3/29 r TR-606 by vuzhmusic
…and here’s one using only the Roland’s TB-303 from the Electret Quintet 5, just released today!
December24x TB-303 by vuzhmusic
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hm… wouldn’t that pair of tracks make a nice 12″?
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Check out the newest one, or download the whole bunch, it’s all free!
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From January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2009… the Zeroes…
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This was the second decade of Vuzh Music (officially twenty years in 2011). Here are the best bits of what I did in the last decade, almost all of these are available for free download, so check them out!
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Happy New Year!
Happy New Decade!
A sneak preview of the centerpiece of Electret Quintet 5, which is rumored to be the last release of the ZEROES.
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December24x TB-303 by vuzhmusic
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The admirable Russian netlabel Rus Zud has released a new spooky ambient release on the Internet Archive called Time Anomaly. It is a collaboration between Earth Incubator, who lists himself as being from Antarctica, and Serbian artist Dichotomy Engine.
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The floating and grinding synth compositions on this release remind me of Jeff Greinke and Eduard Artemiev. Quite nice, but a bit short at 23 minutes long. I hope for more from these artists, but for now I’m enjoying this release.
My friend Robert, a.k.a. Gurdonark has written in his blog about the experience of a teleconference with the artists and attendees of the White Cube art installation, for which he curated a collection of music from the ccMixter community (here’s the website of the music collection portion of the show). (I contributed a White Cube Drone to the mix, even though I’m not involved with ccMixter)
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Here’s the money quote from his blog post:
You see one man sit back against a wall and just take in the sound—and you realize that in all your life, all you ever wanted, was for one person to listen, really listen.
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Here’s a link to the rest of it:
http://gurdonark.livejournal.com/849526.html
