C. Reider and friends
Long Defeat Variations



     In 2003, I snuck into the abandoned industrial space which used to house the factory I worked at for 10 years, and I recorded there an hour-long set of improvised ambient music using guitar, frame drum and radio. "the Long Defeat" was the resulting release. In 2008, I decided to re-visit those sounds.

     At the end of February I invited three of my friends and peers to extract sound material from "the Long Defeat" and restructure those sounds according to their own compositional intents. Although they were each given only thirty days to complete the task, all three artists happily took up the challenge and created these radical re-imaginings.

      Download all tracks and cover art below.

     Please visit the websites of the contributing artists to learn more about them:
Track Listing:
  • Variation one by Mystified
  • Variation two by C. Reider
  • Variation three by Kirchenkampf
  • Variation four by Gurdonark
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Commentary on this release:
I don't have an established, comfortable vocabulary for sound/music like this. I can't describe it in the way you would, so I'm left somewhat mute. I can say I enjoy it. Beyond that, I don't know how to talk about the cool little squiggles of noise I hear, or the way the sound ramps up, subsides, builds again. Or how the reverse happens, too. It started out whole and by the end there was dust. But more than that, sound like this is personal. It's meditative, or can be, and what the hell can you say about that? "My fifth chakra opened." "I saw birds." "You hit a brown note in track three."

I've only had time to listen to the first three pieces, so far. All three were/are useful. Your music is useful. Not sure I can say the same for most things I hear. That stuff is entertaining and distracting. Your stuff is engaging. I listen to a lot of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (and various iterations) and get a lot of the same "help" from that sound as I do from yours. Theirs is full of more ready-made context - establishment instrumentation, etc - but I can work with and around that. That said, what I like most about ambient, drone, and exp music like yours -like this- is, that context is missing.

Which brings me back to my opening paragraph. I'm not sure I want vocabulary. I don't want to hear the cleverness. I don't want to know the inspiration. I don't want to know anything. I just want the sound because I want to see where it takes me, all by itself, stripped of those cultural contexts and preconceptions.
--David Porter
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.







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