Vuzh Music Blog

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Nearly nearly.

II II

I’ve just listened through Mystified‘s new 12″ vinyl release “Pulse Ringer Pieces”, and I’m really impressed with my friend Thomas Park’s inspiring and unique take on ambient music.
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The music drifts along with undulating textures of sounds and tones, sometimes with jittery clattering machine rhythms, sometimes without… each song patiently presenting its set of buzzes, chimes, hisses and pings each one in its perfect place. Mystified really portrays a sense of place with these tracks, the sounds really get my imagination going.
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I’m very envious and admiring of the way Thomas can put together strange noises and insistent rhythms and make the whole cohesive and ambient and beautiful.
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The very promising new label Droehnhaus has put out this vinyl record, and I’ve got to hand it to them, they really picked a beautiful set of music, and they put it out with real style. The record was pressed on lovely transparent dark blue vinyl with an enigmatic blue-black cover art.
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I very heartily recommend picking up a copy…
The world needs more strange, underground music on vinyl.
I know from having put out my own record just how much more special the music is on the format it deserves.
Droehnhaus carries the record for Europe, and if you’re in the U.S. you can get a copy direct from the band by emailing autocad13 (at ) hotmail (dot) com

My friend Robert, a.k.a. Gurdonark has just put out a crackerjack little mini album. He found a nice piece of crystal ware and recorded the sound of it as he struck it with a mallet, and took that sound an loaded it into a sampler, and then recorded seven simple, melancholy melodies. Listening to this was the nicest twenty minutes of my day. It will probably be a nice twenty minutes of many days to come. Well done!
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“Seven Virtues” by Gurdonark.

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.

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.

Here’s a link to a website of a mechanized “fully robotic” gamelan orchestra.
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The tracks I’ve heard lack some of the dynamic of a gamelan orchestra, but I still like it. The compositions seem to owe something to IDM.

Gamelatron

Last.FM has its flaws, but it’s been great for discovering new music. Here are a few wonderful gems I’ve found while looking for music that Last.FM’s algorithms have deduced to be “similar to” C. Reider, and “similar to” Drone Forest.
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An absolutely gorgeous 20 minute long bit of grey ambient bliss from Stray Ghost, called A House Of Gold And Oak was recently mentioned on Disquiet, and for good reason, this album is beyond good. (Last.FM link)
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Still Crescent (Myspace/Last.FM) and August Stars (MySpace/ Last.FM) are the same guy, Sébastien Wright , who creates some ridiculously beautiful droning ambient music. This stuff is really great… I wish I could point you to a freely downloadable album, but at least you can stream his music. It’s worth it.
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The eye-poppingly cool website of Erstlaub is appropriate given the high quality of his quietnoise drones. This guy knows how to let a drone develop from one interesting thing into another. Long live Erstlaub! (here’s his Last.FM link)
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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.

… kind of cruddy review from Vital Weekly of the Electret Quintet, part one:

C. REIDER – THE ELECTRET QUINTET (PART ONE) (MP3 by Vuzh Music)
Of course we learned to appreciate the work of C. Reider as one of those drone meisters with lots of online releases. Here however he seems to be moving into a different direction. This is part one of a series of five, dealing with ‘experimental explorations of the textures and sounds of analogue drum machines’. Two drum machines are used here, the Roland TR-808 and the Roland TR-727. There are fed through sound effects, computers perhaps and still operate in a rhythmic manner, although Reider doesn’t want to classify his material as ‘industrial, IDM, minimal-techno and noiseambient’. I must admit I had a hard time with this. None of the five tracks here worked very well. It seemed to me that Reider more or less freely improvised on his drum machine, and let the sounds slip into delay and reverb as well as some other sound effects, but none of the tracks were interesting enough to be played again. There is a strong lack of tension and structure in these pieces and it marches on end, even when the pieces aren’t very long. I sense there is more to this, and Reider hasn’t taken the material to its full capacity yet. Very close to a ‘start’ and very far away from a ‘finish’. (FdW)

I can’t really complain. I myself wrote reviews for a time, so I know what a thankless, and downright difficult task it is to listen and come up with something interesting to say about music releases one after another. Sure it’s kinda sad to have someone get down on what you’ve done, but that’s what you open yourself up for when you submit something to critique.

I am a little surprised that from the same reviewer, I got a pretty favorable review of Fine Failures” which is a.) similar in style to the Electret Quintet, b.) longer in length by thirty minutes and c.) I personally felt unsure about the strength of the work.

I guess you never can tell what people are going to think.
I don’t feel all that bad because his critiques are actually pretty accurate… this IS kind of an improvisatory work in some senses, it’s exploratory and experimental in the real sense, I’m really screwing around trying to find out what works, and doing so in public. I also think the work treads a dangerous line between “beat” music and “experimental” music, falling into a grey area that might set up expectations one way or another which can not be fulfilled.

I also don’t think the series really gels until the third part. (MAN, I can’t wait to get that far into these releases!)

Again, I don’t mean to complain or protest… I really do appreciate the review, I appreciate that he took the time to really listen in order to give a review that’s honest. The bad review also resulted in a lot of website hits, so I almost think there’s not really such a thing as a “bad” review anyway…