Vuzh Music Blog

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.

Nearly nearly.

II II

Some things that I don’t like about ambient / experimental performance setups I’ve seen:

• Over-reliance on laptops. For all I know everyone who does a live show staring at a laptop the whole time has just hit play on iTunes and then plays World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 18 for the rest of the time they’re on stage. It doesn’t make it much better if there is occasional interface with a mixer and Kaoss pad. Not to say I would exclude a laptop, just that it would have to be used in a way that required minimal attention from the performers.
• Noodling around over a backing tape. This seems tacky. I can understand why someone would want to do it, but I don’t like this idea much at all.
• Big drum beats in ambient / noise music. I’m thinking specifically of one band I saw, I can’t remember the name, it might have been one of the Origami Republika outfits… the opening was about 20 or 30 minutes of pretty interesting and challenging noise, then the big drum beat kicked in, and although the crowd loved it, the beat ruined it for me. Big beats are an easy way to please a crowd, it’s low-hanging fruit, it’s a cop-out. I might be interested in making live rhythmic or even beat music at some point, but surely in a different way than this.

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Things I do like:

• Homemade instrumentation / oddball instrumentation. I have a bunch of ideas for sculptural noise makers and it’s about time I start constructing some of them. I include automata in this idea.
• Music played in the dark, or near dark. Who needs a light show? The dark is better.
• Quiet audiences. I don’t think there’s anything a performer can do about this other than bind and gag the chatty sons of bitches. Then again, that might be a good way of going about it… hmm…

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Something I wonder about that I don’t yet have an answer for:

• How does an experimental artist on a tight budget decide on instrumentation and strategies so that the sound palette will be rich and diverse and not one-dimensional? (and not “ongepotchket” either)

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I also remembered that there are two “live” performances in my catalog, although neither was performed in front of an audience. One is “the Long Defeat” and the other is Drone Forest’s “June 21,2003″. So I guess if I say I’ve never performed live as an experimental musician, that’s not necessarily true.

2008 was a productive year at Vuzh Music.

Releases by C. Reider
Fine Failures
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Inconstant
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the Electret Quintet I
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Linguism

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Other Releases w/ work by C. Reider
Long Defeat Variations
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Beyond Numb Remixes
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String Ambient
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Other Vuzh Music releases
the Implicit Order – Disposable Outcome
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Mystery Disc
???
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Other new features
C. Reider MySpace page
C. Reider Last.FM page
Vuzh Music Blog

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.