Vuzh Music Blog

Let’s ALL be composers!

C. Reider — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 02:15:36 +0000

JUST FOLLOW THESE SIMPLE INSTRUCTIONS:
[1] Declare your intention to create a ‘composition.’
[2] Start a piece at some time.
[3] Cause something to happen over a period of time (it doesn’t matter what happens in your ‘time hole’ – we have critics to tell us whether it’s any good or not, so we won’t worry about that part).
[4] End the piece at some time (or keep it going, telling the audience that it is a ‘work in progress’).
[5] Get a part time job so you can continue to do stuff like this.
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– all of the above cribbed from Frank Zappa’s “The Real Frank Zappa Book”

Compilation Appearances

C. Reider — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 22:02:07 +0000

C. Reider has submitted a few tracks for some freely downloadable compilations:
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Gone in 60 Seconds– This is a collection of tracks, all of which are only one minute long. Brevity is good. I haven’t had a chance to play through all the tracks yet, but there are many good names, such as PBK, Pavonine, Big City Orchestra, ENE… I submitted a one minute long track by Drone Forest.
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No-R-Mal II — The follow up to the incredible compilation of a few years ago is longer and more incredible. This is SEVEN HOURS of underground goodness, right here. Burn this to an mp3 CDr and you’ve got enough underground goodness to last through an entire work-day. It could be argued that in the underground, there is a quantitative glut of musicians, but this compilation proves that while there is a high quantity, there is plenty of QUALITY out there too. I recommend this and its predecessor as perfect starters for the new fan of obscure music. I contributed an exclusive track called “Will Fall”. Many friends of mine, and artists that I respect populate this stellar comp.

World Listening Day

C. Reider — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:05:17 +0000

My wife and I participated, today, in the first World Listening Day.
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We purposefully did not listen to any music all day, except as it was playing (sound pollution) from the ceiling speakers at the grocery store, and by other accidental means.
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Instead we sat outside for breakfast, and purposefully listened to our surroundings. The highlight of this session came when a woman walked by, singing at full voice, with not a care in the world about what anyone would think about her. We were happy to listen.
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As described on the World Listening Project’s website, part of the holiday’s purpose is to listen to field recordings, so we tuned in to several of the recordings hosted here by Radio Aporee for the World Listening Day event.
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Later on, my friend Gurdonark notified me (and the rest of his readers) via his Twitter feed about a compilation calling for submissions called “Of Places and Moments“. The concept requires participants to download some field recordings hosted on the website, alter them in some way, and use them in a composition. I found this to be an appropriate activity for the day, and I labored a good amount toward composing a piece for this compilation.
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Later still, my wife and I went to Roger’s Grove in Longmont, with the intention of walking around listening. We very much enjoyed listening to leaves rustling, birds chirping, chattering and buzzing… when we encountered a very serendipitous find that I had never seen before even though we’d visited the park many times. A public art piece entitled “Listening Stones” by Robert Tully has as its centerpiece a ten foot tall boulder surrounded by smaller boulders. On the side that faces away from the trail, the large, centerpiece has a parabolic reflector ground into it, with a seat, situated such that your head is at the center of the reflector. The reflector points at a bend in the Saint Vrain river.
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(photo from city of Longmont website)
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We spent a great deal of time listening to the focus of sound inside the sculpture. The effect is something like stepping into a separate space where quiet sounds become clear and amplified, it’s uncanny.
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The sculpture had a mathematical formula etched on its seat: (X² / 2131) + (Y² / 67) = 1
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We also walked around banging on bridge supports and found objects with our knuckles. It’s too bad I didn’t have a hand-held recorder to bring along.

Fragment Three Re-Works

C. Reider — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:31:58 +0000

I’ve just released my newest recording, compositions based on twenty-year-old tracks by both P B K and Vidna Obmana!
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Vidna Obmana is as close to a household name for ambient music as you can get, and he was gracious enough to not only let me transform his music from pretty calming ambient music into spiky / noisy / weird not-quite-ambient music, but he okayed its release for free on my netlabel!
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P B K is a highly regarded noise musician, he and I have worked together somewhat frequently over the years, most recently on the collaborative CD “Discorporate“. His music is a constant source of inspiration to experimental musicians worldwide.
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The two of them released a split tape in 1991 called “Fragment 3“. This new recording is a track-by-track deconstruction of each song, rendering something new with the raw material provided by these two incredible artists.
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With amazing artwork by Anna Guseva, and music by turns frightening and mesmerizing, this one is not to be missed by any lover of experimental noisy ambient music.
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artist: C. Reider
title: Fragment Three Re-Works
format: mp3
keywords: experimental, noiseambient, drone

Download the whole thing here
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http://www.vuzhmusic.com/releases/fragment.html

frtnth

C. Reider — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:04:33 +0000

I just uploaded a track to SoundCloud from my 1998 collaboration with the Implicit Order. It’s a nice mix of noise & calming ambience… one of my favorite tracks from that project.

frtnth (c. reider & the implicit order) by vuzhmusic

Streamlined website!

C. Reider — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 20:54:18 +0000

Big enormous huge coding project is complete!
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The website is streamlined!
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Vuzh Music dot com
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I made the website 1000000000x more user friendly. In fact, you don’t even have to leave the front page if you don’t want to, you could suck up every free mp3 and order every product right there without going anywhere. It’s like… almost something that makes sense.
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I also added new upgraded downloads for Man-Hours and the Long Defeat… and made available (after a long absence) some things i did when i lost my mind and Harlan’s Collective Sounds.
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This is as good a reason as any to beef up your collection of Vuzh Music stuff:
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http://www.vuzhmusic.com

Vuzh Music News

C. Reider — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 02:00:58 +0000

Hello all!
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Over the next little while I am going to be streamlining the Vuzh Music website. The intent is to make the site easier to use for those who don’t want to spend a lot of time navigating from page to page.
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You are looking at the first part of the changes. The old news page (link) had made itself irrelevant the moment I made this blog. It was harder to update than the blog, and so I procrastinated, and eventually fell so far behind that it’s embarrassing.
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From now, on, clicking on the ‘news’ link will take you to the ‘Vuzh Music News’ category of this WordPress blog. This category will contain the most easily digestible, and most important news items, such as announcements about major releases and so forth.
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There is much more to the Vuzh Music blog, of course, including thoughts, reviews of other music I find on the net, links to articles… and so on. But for now, the narrow focus of this blog category should serve well for delivering the most important news to visitors of this site.

A Surprise Set of Remixes from Fosel

C. Reider — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:14:31 +0000

This afternoon, I received a surprise email from someone I don’t know and had never up ’till now heard of, with the subject line “remixed your tracks”. This is what the email linked to:
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My downloadable tracks are released under a Creative Commons license which says, basically, that as long as you are not making money off of it, and give me credit, you can sample and appropriate anything I do to your heart’s jolly content. It’s just that this happens quite infrequently!
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The tracks by the New Mexico artist Fosel are really stupendous. The title of the work is “problem of universals: c. reider remixes“, it’s an atmospheric reworking of some tracks from the Electret Quintet blended with some ambient guitar noises from Long Defeat.
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Listen to them and/or download them and THEN listen to them here:

http://fosel.bandcamp.com/album/problem-of-universals-c-reider-remixes

Drone for Oil

C. Reider — Mon, 17 May 2010 00:03:34 +0000

Brand new track, a SoundCloud exclusive:
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Drone for Oil by vuzhmusic

Marc Weidenbaum interview

C. Reider — Fri, 14 May 2010 01:40:25 +0000

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