Post Tagged pbk

PBK/C. Reider collab Now Available

Tuesday, 07 July 2009





Lumpy thinks those CDs look pretty cool.

I’ll be emailing Paypal requests to people who requested to be in line for one of these discs…
There are a handful of discs still available, if you want one, you had better act quickly.

These are hand-numbered in a limited edition of 120 in a slimline DVD case with full color inner and outer sleeve, not sealed.

European customers are directed to get their copies directly from the label Impulsy Stetoskopu (myspace link) …

Otherwise, please check out the page at Vuzh Music for PBK / C. Reider’s new collaboration Discorporate, which includes short sound samples of all tracks. Here’s that link: PBK / C. Reider – “Discorporate” at Vuzh Music




For more information:
Vuzh Music
Vuzh Music Blog


PBK and C. Reider

Monday, 06 June 2009

I am extremely pleased and proud to announce the release of the long-awaited collaboration between respected noiseambient composer PBK and C. Reider of Vuzh Music.





The release of this album is nearly ten years in the making, as sound sources have been exchanged over this long time between these two artists, finally culminating in a diverse and engaging set of industrial noise and ambient sound works, an incredible document of modern directions in abstract sound.

“Discorporate” (entry on Discogs) is now available on in an extremely limited edition of 120 from Impulsy Stetoskopu, (MySpace link which includes sound samples of the new release) an incredible Polish label who has released some outstanding noise from well-respected names in noise-music such as Hands To, Knurl, John Waterman, AMK and many others.

I will have copies available very soon for anyone interested to own this rare CD here in the USA… PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT or email if you’re interested and I will contact you when the album is available in the United States!


PBK – Under My Breath

Monday, 03 March 2009

PBK’s newest CD “Under My Breath” has been potentially ‘about to be released’ for much of the last decade. Thankfully for all of us who are fans of his work, the release is finally available.

The release features a diverse assortment of highly abstract soundwork, with collaborators such as Aube, Wolf Eyes, Artificial Memory Trace, Tore Boe, Christian Renou (from Brume), Nigel Ayers (from Nocturnal Emissions), John Wiggins, Dale Lloyd and C. Reider (that’s me!)

PBK’s completely unique compositional style is well suited to a release like this, where a diverse group of collaborators contribute a varied sound palette. He draws strongly on the distinct characters of electroacoustic, musique concréte, ambient and noise musics in his sound. Each song presents a completely new atmosphere, in which there is a feeling of motion through a sort of “painting” or “landscape”, where new features lurch unexpectedly into view with quivering, crackling energies.

On this new album, there is a kind of highly tense melancholy, a kind of mixture of fear and sadness, leading directly to his concept… if I may quote:

“The main control utilized by any government is “fear” as it relates to personal safety. We see this quite clearly in the U.S. since the events of 9/11. They turn huge populaces into quivering paranoiacs through media saturation and cold-war tactics. So came this idea that if anything were to be said out loud that was contrary to the “approved” line of thinking, that it would have to be said secretly, quietly, or “under the breath”


On a personal note, his use of source material I originally used on my early 2001 release some things I did when I lost my mind, connects this album to that time period very strongly for me. I think this music could not come from any other time period.

The Russian label Waystyx has published the CD in a very handsome die-cut cover, with graphic elements interweaving with the cut elements. The inside recording notes and song titles can only be read in the reflection of the CD itself, which is a pretty clever presentation.

You could go to PBK’s website for more information on how to order the CD. It is highly recommended by me.

One more quote from PBK about the new CD:

“The project was conceived to be similar to my “Life-Sense Revoked” CD relase from a few years ago, i.e a sort-of all-star collaborative recording with friends of mine whose music I admire. My personal goal with this was to achieve a new kind of ambient music for the 2000’s, one which incorporates musique concrete elements, turntable experimentalism and some of the textural elements which have been showing up in my work for years. I feel that this is a brilliant release and I hope you will enjoy listening to it as well. The guests on this recording are among my most cherished friends working in avant garde music today. I realize the odds are against us, we work in an area of sound production where neglect is the order of the day, we can’t get paid for our music, we self-release our work quite often just to document what we are doing. We continue to work against the odds in our own little corners of the world, striving to take our life experiences and turn them into art. Hopefully this release will help us gain a little wider audience, especially in the Eastern European and Russian communities where their ears seem to be really wide open and hungry for new sounds.”


If you are interested to hear more PBK work featuring collaborative work with C. Reider, (in anticipation of our full length collab CD which should hopefully come out this Summer) I recommend (very strongly) his excellent CD “Headmix”, which has been recently made available as a free download from his SoundGenetic blog. It’s also available in its entirety on Last.FM, right here.


Links and Listening

Saturday, 01 January 2009

It is a lovely cold day, snow is in the air. We’re in the first days of the last year of the Zeroes. I’m listening to a Last.FM stream of artists that the website has determined are similar to Arvo Pärt, selections from John Cage, Terry Riley, William Basinski…

I wonder sometimes about whether other musicians occupying the underground do a lot of listening to their contemporaries and peers. I know there are some musicians who claim to not listen to music at all unless it is their own. I have never been of that custom. I do listen to a lot of my music, primarily the very current material, but occasionally some older work, sometimes just to put myself back in the frame of mind of myself as a younger composer, but I also listen very avidly to underground music.

I occasionally become so enamored of certain musicians’ work that I veer towards becoming what Kevin Kelly calls a “true fan” in his essay 1,000 True Fans. For some very unknown artists this is probably a little strange, they may not have ever had someone with a rabid interest in their music, who wants a copy of everything they’ve ever done. I’ve long had a very strong relationship to the music that I like.

When I first started trading cassettes of my music with other hometapers in the Nineties I formed an especially strong bond with the music made by several artists whose work felt, to me, contemporary and strongly linked to my own… or what I wanted mine to be. I definitely saw these groups as being interrelated in some way, even part of “a scene” of microaudible proportions although most of them did not even know each other, and in some cases did not even know of each other.

I’m not as deeply into their music as I was for a time, but it’s illuminating to look back and remember what it was that I admired about this music.

In no particular order:

Eyelight – Jehn Cerron made magical soundscapes using her voice, crackly/grainy samples and a tape looper. She still makes music (Here’s her MySpace page). Her music now is a little more beat-oriented and leans toward song-like structures more than it used to.

the Implicit Order – Anthony Washburn’s grainy noise washes and hypnotic loops keyed into my brain perfectly. I think you can hear how inspired I was by his work on our collaboration Opposing Theories from 1998. I’m also happy to have just released a new album from the Implicit Order called “Disposable Outcome“.

the Tall Bald Grandfathers – I was intrigued by this group’s complete uniqueness, and even just straight out oddness. I was happy to re-release their first album “Incomplete Inheritances“… however I have made the album (temporarily, I hope) unavailable due to my distaste for CDrs. I do not know what the Cascios are currently up to. We haven’t written in some time.

Klimperei – More magic. Clangor and movement and music! I did have a release on Vuzh Music by Christophe Petchanatz’s other band Deleted, again unavailable for the moment. I was particularly obsessed with one album of theirs called “Les Plus Belles Valses”, which can actually be freely downloaded from the band’s blog right here. This is still one of my favorite records of all time… it’s beautiful and great fun. Klimperei is still active, and has a website: http://klimperei.free.fr/

the Drowningbreathing – I wrote with Michael Pittard for a time, and could not really understand what he was writing about much of the time. He had beautiful handwriting. His music was impossibly ghostly and gorgeous. I don’t know why he hasn’t ended up with as much acclaim as someone like Tor Lundvall. I don’t know whether or not he’s still active in music at all, or whether he’s even still alive for that matter.

PBK – His composed “noiseambient” work elevates me. It was through his early work that I really began to understand the beauty in some harsher noises. We’ve collaborated a few times over the years… he also contributed to the Muslimgauze Remix project “El Tafkeera: Re-mixs in Remembrance of Muslimgauze” that I curated. Sometime in 2009 there will be a full length collaborative work that will come out called “Discorporate”.

Kirchenkampf – John Gore has put out some chillingly wonderful ambient & space music in his time. He still puts out some high quality work from his website Cohort Records.

Tarkatak – Lutz Pruditsch’s work with nebulous, atmospheric ambient music is untouchable. His website is here. We collaborated on one record called the Druser Pricid, which is not currently available from my website, but may be on his. I sent Lutz some new material to work on, but I do not know if we will actually complete a new collaboration together.

Qubais Reed Ghazala – A genius languishing in relative obscurity. His early work in and promotion of circuit bending is maybe more well known than his music, which is of the first class. I know that he has a website, but I do not know if he is still active with music.

Harlan – I dig this guy’s weird spazzy approach to groove music, and I could have seen him rising to prominence in the same way that someone like Odd Nosdam did. He has made an appearance on Vuzh Music once or twice.

Static Insect – Kevin Paisley’s music fluctuated between a sort of industrial experimentalism and musique concrete and noisy ambience. I really don’t know what he’s up to now. I haven’t seen his name floating around the internet. We put out a split tape together one time where we composed an alternate soundtrack to the movie “Altered States”, called “Altered Statements”. I will probably not re-release that recording, since I am not really happy with my work on that tape, even if I do think it was important in my musical learning and development (I had not used samples to construct music up until that work.)

Cheryl E. Leonard – Cheryl was/is an extremely talented sound collagist. She sent me a tape of pretty much everything she’d ever done & I think I wore the thing out! I recently re-found her work, and, according to her MySpace, she’s done an album with nothing but rocks and water. Anyone who knows me pretty well would say, ‘Oh well no wonder C. is into this stuff.’ She’s got a website which says that her newest project is a trip to Antartica to make music there. Aaagh! Mucho admiration.


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