Impatiently gathering dust
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Charles Ives’ first symphony was completed in 1898. It was first performed in 1953.
Ellard is dead, long live Ellard
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
OOF.
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The public can only handle a very small period of an artist’s output and once that is in place, the artist is effectively dead to them.
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I guess this is a good argument for my strategy (unintended though it may have been) to plod along for decades and never have any public recognition whatsoever. If the public don’t know you’re there, they can’t forget you!
Work
Sunday, 8 November 2009
More work on the Buddha Reduction today. Spiralling closer and closer to a final mix / master. Today involved a lot of combing over files with a “fine toothed comb” so to speak… listening to each file with headphones on (something I really almost never do!) listening for clicks and unwanted anomalies.
I was confronted with new kinds of distortion, and came up with new ways of thwarting them.
I discovered unwelcome frequency peaks that were previously hidden. I squashed them.
I redrew the line between acceptable noise and unacceptable noise, and excavated the terrain to match the map.
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Some days, my music work involves a lot of waiting for files to process, and then performing some small task and waiting again some more for files to process.
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Tedium is an acceptable side-effect to progress.
Electret Quintet 4
Sunday, 1 November 2009
The penultimate in this series of five free mp3 releases is out now. The Electret Quintet is an experimental series of recordings completed during the year 2008, using a single analogue drum machine to experiment with rhythmic and arhythmic sound fields, ending up with various shades of minimal-techno, industrial, noise and ambient.
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As it stands, all of the releases are rather challenging in various respects, and each release has its own characteristic strengths and weaknesses… the first release was explosive and unfocussed, the second reeled back the excesses of the first and stands quiet and reflective, the third is my favorite, with quite well-developed tracks and a very difficult centerpiece…
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Number four is quite strange, containing one of the more melodious tracks in the series, and then stretching out into several very long abstractions. It’s the longest release so far, at 45 minutes long.
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I hope you like it!
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http://www.vuzhmusic.com/releases/electretquintet.html
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Zondagmorgen
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Zondagmorgen’s “La Fin du Monde” is a free netlabel release from Just Not Normal. It is perfect music for, indeed, a Sunday morning, especially a chilly Autumn Sunday morning.
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Its stretched out repeating, shoegazer-inflected musical theme sets a melancholy tone offset by chilly blurred percussion noises that hint at a ‘groove’ but never quite get into one. Later there is further dissolution into a long, refrigerated drone, worthy of comparison to Drone Forest, if I do say so myself.
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Good stuff!
Steam Inspector
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Just released this week!
“Steam Inspector” by C. Reider
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A lot of the stuff I do is really weird, but this one is just completely out there…
Steam Inspector is a long form sound-collage which centers on rhythmic elements, mechanical and otherwise. It’s the sound of machines malfunctioning as the steam inspector him/herself runs tests with peculiar electronic equipment. Listen and make up your own story about what this piece of music is about.
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Released this week on the stupendous Just Not Normal netlabel!
The sound is now
Monday, 7 September 2009
What was the last music you heard that shocked you and made you think “This is the sound of the future!” ?
Gurdonark and I
Sunday, 30 August 2009
I had a chance to meet the underground musician Gurdonark in person last weekend. Here’s a photo of us hanging out at night in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado!
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Gurdonark, in case you’ve forgotten, was a contributor to the popular Vuzh Music ambient release by C. Reider and Friends Long Defeat Variations.
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You should also check out his really great solo release “Seven Virtues“, which I reviewed on this blog in January.
Tiago Morgado
Sunday, 30 August 2009
I’ve just found a few recordings by an interesting underground artist named Tiago Morgado. He runs the netlabel XS Records from his homebase in Portugal.
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His release 363 features some long avant-garde flavoured improvisations, with spacey analogue synth treatments burbling and subdued percussive elements in the background.
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The far more frantic Algorithmic Chaos EP, released under the alias DNP X-Citer, features angular compositions of viola phrases paired with with abstract skittering percussion and electronic noises pointing to a clear lineage with Autechre’s more complex work. It’s worth a listen.
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