Acts of Silence, the blog of steadfast netlabel booster David Nemeth has written up Vuzh Music’s May 2011 release of C. Reider’s Owning Extinctions…
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Check out that review: Acts of Silence: Shame – Despair – Anger
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?
A brief break in my school-induced blog silence to point to a review of the new freely downloadable release of my 2000 cassette release Crook’d Finger vs. Harlan / Crook’d Finger vs. D. Rhythm:O. The review appears on the Acts of Silence blog, reviewing netlabel music (and hooray for that!).
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It reads:
Before dubstep, there was a C. Reider remix and all was well. In listening to the Crook’d Finger remixes of Harlan and D.Rhythm:O, Reider destroys the concept of labeling music from way back in 2000. These nine tracks were released as a limited edition cassette with the artists each taking a side as Reider’s alias Crook’d Finger puts his remarkable remixing chops to the test. Versus truly defies any label as the tracks easily span several genres of electronic music, for example the remix of Harlan’s “Hence” (mp3) and the remix of D.Rythm:O’s “Slow Flow / Volt Spur” (mp3). I realize that this review might not be of much help in discerning whether you should download or not — you should by the way —, but I’ll let C. Reider have the last word:
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“The Crook’d Finger stuff is, without a doubt, the most approachable music I have ever done, and I always thought it could reach a wider audience. Maybe now that it’s available in such a free and open format, it can.”
The Disruptive Platypus blog has offered up a brief, but positive review of my recent collaboration with Desohll “Falling into Disrepair” out on the Dark Winter netlabel.
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Read the review here
Disquiet posted a review of Steam Inspector.
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http://disquiet.com/2010/09/20/c-reider-steam-inspector/
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If the title summons up some Hayao Miyazaki vision of a homunculoid cartoon character making its way through a realm equal parts fantasy and dessication, you aren’t far off.
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Read the entire review here
I ♥ Noise posted a selected discography of C. Reider, including a pre-beard photo AND a beardy photo, so you can contrast and compare. Also looks like there’s that cool video of the track Gurdonark did with some of my sounds:
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C. Reider Selected Discography at I Heart Noise.
Marc was interviewed about the brand new music compilation “Despite the Downturn”.
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Here’s a pretty great quote about some of the contributions, including my own:
What made this project so natural was that the illustration by Jeremy Traum suggested itself as a score because it had a score in it. Some of the musicians on Despite the Downturn interpreted the music in the score literally, especially Tom Moody, who fed the notes into MIDI and took it from there — the result to me sounds like Scott Joplin and Conlon Nancarrow getting along quite nicely. Others used the score as a canvas that only by coincidence had notes in it; they took it as a narrative, the way C. Reider has the hip-hop appear at the end, an aural symbol of the urchins that is, compositionally, like something Paul Dukas might have done if The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — perhaps the great work of narrative music about the unintended consequences of systems — had been about filesharing.
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Here’s part one
and part two.
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There’s also a cool writeup of the compilation at Flavorwire here:What “The Death of the Music Industry” Really Sounds Like.
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In case you missed earlier opportunities to download this cool compilation of new experimental music, here’s the link:
Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album
Disquiet / Marc Wiedenbaum’s compilation “Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album” — on which I was pleased & honored to be able to appear — was noticed by Cory Doctorow & written up for the enormo-e-zine BoingBoing.
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http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/05/musicians-record-alb.html. Go check it out! It’s fun reading the comments there.
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).
I was pleased to read today a nice write up of one of my tracks from the Electret Quintet 4 that I have posted on my SoundCloud page… Marc Weidenbaum writes:
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…his sole instrument is an early analog drum machine, one called the TR-606, which was manufactured by the Roland corporation in the early 1980s. Reider milks the machine for all it is worth, and what’s remarkable about it isn’t just that he’s taken a tool of percussion and turned it into a tool for space music — all wandering echoes and hallucinated canyons — but how much, to fans of his other work, it is immediately of a piece with things he’s made on far different instruments on other sonic journeys he’s taken.
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Read the entire article here:
Downstream, December 4, 2009
SoundCloud: Vuzh Does TR-606 Space Music
