Vuzh Music Blog

ne quid nimis has been unavailable for a very long time, nearly a decade. I’m happy to have it available again, even with its flaws… so many things I might do differently now!
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By the time I released ne quid nimis I was in flux between being a mail artist and being a musician. I had already recorded all of the ENDT material, and later the Luster material that became the not named cassette… and I had conducted the mail art/sound art project “GRIME: the secret content of the abandoned roadside tapes”. I’d also used my new 4-track which I’d bought from a guy who was in naram sin to finish up a collaboration with Dr. Terrence 13 called the Unseelie Court. Side note: Dr. 13 is now a puppeteer (youtube channel here).
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So this record was more or less my fourth main musical undertaking… maybe attaching a number in a sequence is not entirely accurate, I had been playing with recorded sound since my teens, now and again, whenever I could!
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This was the first musical project that I felt that I had complete control over. Much of the previous work had been in collaboration… Even the Luster tape, essentially solo work, was recorded and engineered by a guy who later went on to be a “real” recording engineer. It felt strange for me having someone else recording and engineering for me, and even if I had no idea how to record music by myself, it felt much more natural to explore sounds with the intimacy of one man and his tape recorder.
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What I didn’t have was focus. I recorded a bunch of stuff and didn’t really have any idea of sticking it all together as an “album”. I guess I was more into conducting audio ‘research’. I made mix tapes for my friends of the things I was working on, but for some reason an official “album” type release hadn’t occurred to me.
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Carl Howard of AudioFile Tapes (now an internet radio DJ here) was a huge encouragement for me at this time, I might not have put this record out at all if it hadn’t been for him. I owe him much gratitude! I don’t remember what he told me, it may have just been “put together all your good stuff on one tape and give it to me and I’ll put it out on my label.” That’s probably all I really needed, though!
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Carl’s impressive tape label was sadly lost due to a massive computer crash sometime in the latter nineties. I think this was a great loss to the whole underground. I’m pretty sure he had released about 200 tapes by the likes of Maeror Tri, Ed Ka-Spel, Jim O’Rourke, Klimperei, the Drowningbreathing, Swinebolt 45… some of those guys even have Wikipedia pages now!
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Anyhow, I thought it might be fun, since this release is so absolutely ANCIENT to write a commentary on this release song by song, so I’ll be making a few more posts as the days go by about each track on the release. I might have more to say about some tracks than others, but if you like this release, you might have some fun reading my memories of making it.
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more to follow…

I went google searching for some plug-ins today.
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When I first started migrating my recording set-up from the VS-880 to the computer, I did a lot of work in a very early version of MetaSynth. Some of the features I used most in that program were the wave shaping and convolution effects. When I upgraded from OS 9 to OS X, my old version of MetaSynth didn’t work anymore, not even when I booted in Classic.
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Now, I feel like I’m really missing the capabilities of that platform. I have plundered the freeware plugins clearinghouses again and again, looking for something that might approximate the wave shaper and easy convolution of that early version of MetaSynth and I always come up with less than I was hoping for. Going forward has pushed me backwards.
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Sadly, the current version of MetaSynth is 500 bucks, and although I’m sure it’s worth every penny, I’ve never been able to easily spend that kind of money on my studio. I am very frugal when it comes to music equipment. I know that if I won the lottery or something, I’d probably spend a good amount on music stuff, but on the other hand, I really don’t feel like I need much of anything that I don’t already have. In fact, I kind of always have thrived on working with the limitations of musical equipment that’s less than state-of-the-art. Having forced limitations is actually pretty inspiring.
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Today’s search for plugins again did not yield anything that works (SonicBirth’s several convolution builds tend to crash my audio editor, if not the whole computer).
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While looking for one thing, however, I found something else: a very nice little freeware VST synth that has one slightly adjustable “ping” sound that’s tuned to Just Intonation. Playing around with that little synth was pretty inspiring, and I completed one new song with it.
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I do sometimes feel… I dunno… claustrophobic? with the Western scale. This is part of why I don’t make a lot of music with melody. Using Just intonation is a kind of limitation too, you can’t naturally make a melody that sounds “right” to ears that grew up listening to classic rock radio stations. The difference between how limiting this makes me feel and the extent to which this new convention frees me up is blurry.
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Lately, I feel inspired. Most of my inspiration is directed towards conceiving physical objects that make noise, in this case variants on gongs and chimes… and automatons that are above my technical expertise.
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I also have pushed ahead with making some new music, even if my current efforts with mixing and mastering are not complete.
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The sound areas I feel like exploring these days are divergent, one the one hand, I feel like making some pretty / calming music with actual tones / melody… and on the other hand I am drawn toward noisy / electro-acoustic / musique concrete stuff.
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If there were, in theory, to be someone who were really interested in my music, I would have to think it’d be a frustrating interest… since I can not stay mired in one genre. A listener to my music, if there were to ever be one, would have to be accepting of each available album sounding quite different from the last.
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I am coming to approach mixing and mastering with total dread.
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It’s such a long, drawn out process for me, taking weeks… sometimes if I give up halfway & have to come back to it, it can be months.
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I have learned that I cannot trust the way the music sounds through one set of speakers, the premix may sound ecstatic but if I burn a CD of that, if I listen to it on any other stereo I won’t hear the same thing that I heard when I was creating the piece originally…
…so I listen to the same piece of music repetitively, two to four times on different sets of stereo equipment while determining what kinds of changes I might need to make. Then I take my notes and remix and remaster, and then I’ll have to listen again to determine the changes I need to make. Then I’ll make those changes,
I’ll go through the listen/adjust/listen/adjust process again, and again and again… until I’ve hit that magic, blissful moment when everything sounds right on whatever stereo equipment I play the music through.
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When I listen to an unacceptable master, it is simultaneously informative (too much hi-mid here… clean up that crackle at 2 minutes 43 seconds… oh! better mix down that part there… where’s the BASS?) and disheartening. DIS->heartening.
When I listen to a poorly mixed/mastered version of my music, I am FILLED with doubt about why I engage in this activity at all. I am confronted with the horror of my music’s dark side.
I’m already wont to doubt my own worth as a composer, but hearing the music again and again when it doesn’t sound the way I originally envisioned really gets under my skin.
Sadly most of the mixing/mastering process entails listening to unacceptable master after unacceptable master over and over and over. The psychological effect is something like staring compulsively at a slideshow of every single misstep, screwup and failure you’ve committed in the last couple of months. Eventually you start to think “Hey, I kinda suck!”
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A well known professional mastering engineer can charge $500 for a single song which he or she will spend a few hours time on, utilizing very expensive professional equipment. Easy money. On the other hand, many amateur musicians seem to be able to stumble upon a good mix that sounds present and balanced next to professionally mixed music without any real apparent trouble at all.
There are CD repro / musicians’ services clearinghouses that offer mastering deals where you can get your whole album mastered for three hundred clams. Those hard-earned bivalves will buy you the time it takes for a brainless goateed fratboy to run your music through a pre-set bunch of EQ curves and compression designed to make all music “fat”. He won’t actually listen to the music while doing this, to be sure. 311 will blast through the monitors while your music is being “mastered”.
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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on the mixing and mastering for the second installment of the Electret Quintet, and a re-release of an early recording of mine called “ne quid nimis” and on a track for a compilation by the promising new label Droehnhaus.
I’m overwhelmed with that familiar mixture of hopeful promise and gut-churning doubt that comes with every mastering process. The sheer volume of WORK involved in producing a version of my music available to the public… much of it unpleasant… sometimes encourages me to fantasize a bit about alternatives, such as live performance.
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To perform live, to create directly for a limited time and then let go… this seems like a very alluring alternative to the tedious sculpting of my recorded work, of living with one project for so much time before completion.
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In my twenty plus years of recording experimental music, I have never once attempted to perform live. There is, truthfully, very little that is performance-based about my music. I record with a method that involves selection->manipulation->assembly->detailing. For every 10 minutes of performance in my recorded work there are untold hours of editing. I actually really like editing, it’s very joyful and natural for me. Through editing the small sounds become the big sounds.
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So how do I do it? How do I step out – as one guy with limited equipment – and make a big, full sound that’s not monotonous and that I can be proud of?
I know I will continue to ask myself this question for some time to come. For me, it’s a “big” question.

A while ago, I made up a genre term “Quiet Noise” to describe the genre I and others had delved into, one which was not quite ambient, not quite noise. I used it frequently to describe my music. Later, I thought maybe “Grey Ambient” might be another good descriptor, as it’s in between “Dark Ambient” and the lighter moods of “Ambient”… I never really used the term “Grey Ambient” much, even though it’s really as good as any other, and who doesn’t like grey? Grey is awesome. In between is a good place to be.

I stopped, however, being a real advocate for the term “Quiet Noise” a few years ago, when I realized that PBK had come up with the term “Noiseambient” which seemed to be catching on. Lately everytime I might’ve otherwise used “quietnoise”, I’ve instead used “noiseambient”.

In Disquiet today I’ve seen the first use of the term “Quiet Noise” outside of my own use (you’ll find a lot of it on my website) — although after mentioning this, my friend Loki told me that he has seen the term in forums describing bands such as the Hafler Trio and artists on 12k_Line.

I’ve been challenged to think about my music in a different way after having recently joined a couple of the big social networking sites, such as MySpace and Last.FM, and having set up an artist page for C. Reider at Last.FM. The quandary for me on these sites lies in picking a handful of tracks from my history of recording that is somehow representative of my work as a whole.

So: I plug in some tracks that represent my experimental / avant-garde side, and then some others that represent my drone ambient side, and some others that represent my experiments with rhythm and minimal techno… fine. I decide to show a bias toward newer music over the rest of my nearly 20 years worth of back-catalogue… No problem.

Then I listen back to what I’ve come up with… In theory it should all flow together beautifully, instead it all crashes together ungracefully.

The question, I guess, is whether my brain is playing a trick on me, do I partition these sides of my musical output into strict compartments, or is my music really in conflict with itself?

Where is the connective tissue?