Randy Greif

Last updated

Randy Greif
Born (1957-09-25) 25 September 1957 (age 66)
Genres Noise, Alternative, Sound art, Noise Music
Occupation(s)Music Composer
Labels Soleilmoon, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Swinging Axe Productions, RRR, Staalplaat

Randy Greif is a noise music composer who often incorporates electronic music and musique concrete collage with spoken word and field recordings. [1]

Contents

Early career

Since the mid-1970s, Greif has composed electronic music, musique concrete and computer-generated music [2] and in 1983 he started the DIY label Swinging Axe Productions (SAP) to release his own work and those of like-minded artists. The various alias names Greif has recorded under include Screaming Dukduks and Shadowbug 4. During the first few years of his career, only a handful of cassette-only releases were available, including those by Sound of Pig, Controlled Bleeding, Merzbow, Illusion of Safety and If, Bwana. In 1988 a long 8 minute track by Greif called The Rift In The Earth was selected to appear on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine issue #20 Media Myth, which brought further international attention to his work. [3]

Swinging Axe Productions

In 1985 Swinging Axe Productions released on cassette tape a collaboration between Randy Greif and writer Alva Svoboda titled Easy Green Proof that used Svoboda's disturbing poems in which his readings were manipulated and set against electronic atmospheres. Also released was location recordings from Papua New Guinea which featured not only indigenous music but folk stories, theater and a church meeting in Pidgin English. This was the first of several such releases, the other two being from Amazonia and Thailand.

RRR label

The first album done for another label was his Bacteria and Gravity for the RRR label in 1987 on which the second side is one long piece filled with tribal rhythms, other-worldly voices and odd sounds such a bullfrog and car horn. Shortly after this release, Greif teamed up with Mikhail Bohonus of WarWorld to form Static Effect, who performed improvisational music. They toured North America and Canada and released a number of cassettes and vinyl before disbanding in 1990.

Staalplaat label

In 1990 Greif had begun work on his most ambitious project to date: a 6-hour musical and textural setting for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland . The spoken text is often deconstructed into phonemes of pure sound and then returned to recognizable words. This project took 5 years and the CDs were released serially on the Staalplaat label in special packaging.

The next CD, The Barnacles Inside, also on the Staalplaat label, was released in 1994. Although most tracks on this CD incorporate manipulated voices, there is no discernible text. About this same time Greif began a project with Dan Burke of Illusion of Safety, which after a year of collaborating by exchanging sequences, sounds, and tapes through the mail resulted in Fragment 56. The intention of this project was to use environmental sounds, voices, and atmospheres to create the feeling of a memory or a dream not wholly remembered. Shortly after this release, a split CD with Greif and Illusion of Safety came out titled In Our Little Bodies. Greif's material here was closer to song structure but that definitely does not mean conventions such as melody, choruses, and harmonies. They are highly claustrophobic and obsessive shorter pieces, some of which again feature the voice of Alva Svoboda, sampled and manipulated.

Soleilmoon label

Randy Greif's Verdi's Requiem was released on the Soleilmoon label in Nov. 1997. This is an attempt to abstract the events of Verdi's life in terms of music. The events, however, are all imagined by Greif, and actually did not happen.

In subsequent years, Greif participated with a group called His Masters Voice (or alternately Stylus) which released a CD on Manifold and are featured on a CD from Freedom in a Vacuum / Swinging Axe called Globus and Decibel. Greif's work also appeared on numerous compilations, notably To Step Outside And Keep Walking which has approximately 20 minutes of exclusive material.

Three-CD set

In 1999, Soleilmoon released a 3-CD set wherein Greif collaborated with Robin Storey (of Rapoon/Zoviet France) and Nigel Ayers (of Nocturnal Emissions). This CD explores a very ambient side of their work, but retains a disturbing edge. For one of the 3 CDs, Randy used Nigel's source material, a second was created by Robin using Randy's, and the third had Nigel using Robin's material.

Shadowbug 4

Randy Greif also released a CD on Soleilmoon in 1999 under the name of Shadowbug 4, titled Tiny Voices of Love And Fear. These lean more towards song structure, although the instrumental tracks push the limits of that definition. The only vocals used are extremely chopped up and manipulated electronically. The long out-of-print 5-CD set of Alice in Wonderland was re-issued on Soleilmoon in 2000 with new artwork as well as a set of Alice in Wonderland trading cards that were published in conjunction with the release.

War of the World

2001 saw the release of Randy Greif's War of the World on Soleilmoon. As a follow-up to his 6-hour electro-psycho adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, Greif returned to putting classic literature through the sonic meat-grinder. This time around, though, the work was far more abstracted, and used the novel as more of a springboard for contemporary ideas relating to war—on a global level, a psychological level, and our own resistance to evolving from organic to digital beings.

Even more than the novel itself, Greif incorporated the Orson Welles radio-drama hoax to explore the realm of disinformation and scrambled information, as well as the audience reaction of fear, even to the point of suicide, when faced with the unknown. War of the World is subtitled "an emergency broadcast" as its overall effect was to approximate the feeling of listening to radio transmissions in an emergency situation (inspired during the Northridge earthquake). The feeling is sometimes a jumbled confusion of reports, snippets of speech with interference, electronic noises, and other mysterious bits and pieces. Then, later, to actually meld into the emergency drama itself complete with (non-musical) soundtrack.

Second Shadowbug 4 CD

Also in 2001, Randy Greif released the second Shadowbug 4 CD, titled We Are Beginning Our Descent, and continued his themes of depression and angst by way of dark ambience, slow beats, glitchy electronics and cut-up voices. There are even a few moments here of odd orchestral arrangements amid the pulses and unrecognizable sounds.

Feature film

During the years between 2001 and 2006, Greif wrote and directed the feature film The Three Trials with the following description: "Catherine, a nun with a unique form of narcolepsy, attempts to lose herself in the worlds of religion, adolescent fantasy, and finally masochistic devotion to a man. Her husband accommodates her masochism with increasingly extreme and bizarre rituals. With an experimental and ground-breaking format, The Three Trials incorporates surreal narrative, music video, and abstract imagery. The viewer is left to interpret what is real, what is dream, and what is false narrative in this feverish, pitch-black comedy with a smorgasbord of sexual fetishes." The film incorporates his own music along with many of his collaborators and like-minded artists from industrial music such as: Nurse With Wound, SPK, Rapoon, Controlled Bleeding, Lustmord, Illusion of Safety, Muslimgauze, Shadowbug 4, Skin Chamber

Later releases

In 2007 Greif released Narcoleptic Cells on the Thisco label from Portugal. The album is entirely created from spoken word, but is abstracted into sonic atmospheres rather than as a verbal narrative. Also in 2007 a CD in collaboration with Anna Homler, Brad Cooper and Adam Smith (under the name of Drift) was released on his own Swinging Axe label entitled Bypass Through The Sky. The same year, and also on the Swinging Axe label, a third Shadowbug 4 CD was released called A Thousand Hits Later. In 2009, Greif was featured in the documentary film Grindstone Redux discussing the cassette culture underground of the 1980s. Alice In Wonderland was released in its 3rd edition, with different packaging and artwork, in 2010 on the Soleilmoon label.

Discography and filmography

Cassettes

LPs

CDs

Film

Related Research Articles

The cassette culture refers to the practices associated with amateur production and distribution of music and sound art on compact cassette that emerged in the mid-1970s. The cassette was used by fine artists and poets for the independent distribution of new work. This article focuses on the independent music scene associated with the cassette that burgeoned internationally in the second half of the 1970s.

Rapoon is a musical project of Robin Storey, a former member of Zoviet France, who has released material on notable independent labels such as Staalplaat, Soleilmoon, Manifold, Beta-Lactam Ring, and Lens Records.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Muslimgauze</span> British electronic musician

Muslimgauze was the main musical project of Bryn Jones, a British ethnic electronica and experimental musician who was influenced by conflicts and history in the Muslim world, often with an emphasis on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. With dozens of albums released under the Muslimgauze name, Jones was prolific, but he never achieved mainstream success. His music has been described by one critic as "among the most startling and unique in the noise underground."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Argo Records (UK)</span> British record label

Argo Records is a record label founded by Harley Usill and Cyril Clarke in 1951 with the intention of recording "British music played by British artists", but the company's releases expanded to include spoken word recordings and other projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">People Like Us (musician)</span> Musical artist

People Like Us is the stage name of London DJ multimedia artist Vicki Bennett. She has released a number of albums featuring collages of music and sound since 1992. In recent years, she has performed at a number of modern art galleries, festivals and universities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kevin Drumm</span> American musician

Kevin Drumm is an experimental musician based in Chicago, United States.

Staalplaat is an independent record label that is located in Amsterdam with a separate store in Berlin. Founded in 1982, the company's mission was to create a sound forum for sound artists, who write and perform new and experimental music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maeror Tri</span> German ambient/noise/drone music band

Maeror Tri was an ambient, noise and drone music band from Germany founded in the 1980s which consisted of Stefan "Baraka H" Knappe, Martin "GLIT[s]CH" Gitschel and Helge S. Hammerbrook.

Nocturnal Emissions is Nigel Ayers's sound art project that has released numerous records and CDs in music styles ranging from electro-acoustic, musique concrète, hybridised beats, sound collage, post-industrial music, ambient and noise music. Their sound art has been part of an ongoing multimedia campaign of guerrilla sign ontology utilizing video art, film, hypertext and other media, particularly collage. Nocturnal Emissions were depicted by the novelist Stewart Home.

Pimmon is the recording name of Australian electronic and ambient musician, record producer and arranger, Paul David Gough. He has released records on labels such as Fat Cat Records, Fällt, Tigerbeat6, Staalplaat and Staubgold, and collaborated with Keith Rowe and Oren Ambarchi, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Controlled Bleeding</span> American experimental music group

Controlled Bleeding was an experimental music group based in Massapequa, New York. The group was founded by Paul Lemos, the group's only consistent member. Most of Controlled Bleeding's released recordings feature two main collaborators, Chris Moriarty and vocalist Joe Papa, who both died in the late 2000s. In February 2020 Lemos announced that the band had dissolved.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Old Europa Cafe</span> Italian independent record label

Old Europa Cafe is an Italian independent record label and mail order service specializing in ambient music, noise music, electronic music, and industrial music. It is based in Pordenone. Originating in the early 1980s Old Europa Cafe began as a small cassette label. Some of the original Old Europa Cafe artists included De Fabriek, Mauro Teho Teardo, and Brume. According to founder Rodolfo Protti, Old Europa Cafe has two guidelines for musick it releases—uncompromising industrial sounds and esoteric dark ambient styles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Duncan (artist)</span> American performance and sound artist

John Duncan is an American multi-platform artist whose body of work includes performance art, installations, contemporary music, video art and experimental film, often involving the extensive use of recorded sound. His music is composed mainly of recordings from shortwave radio, field recordings and voice. His events and installations are a form of existential research, often confrontational in nature. Duncan currently lives in Bologna, Italy.

<i>Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine</i>

Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine utilized the audio cassette medium to distribute no wave downtown music and audio art and was in activity for the ten years of 1983–1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voice of Eye</span> American experimental music duo

Voice of Eye is a Taos, New Mexico based experimental ambient music duo whose members are Bonnie McNaim and Jim Wilson. Formed in 1989 in Houston, Texas, their sound is one that blends electronic soundscapes, dark ambient, drone, and world music, particularly with Middle Eastern overtones, and tends to evoke an atmospheric or shamanistic quality. Many of the instruments used are home-made or heavily modified. Using this "odd palette of instrumentation," their music has been described as "largely indescribable, but totally inviting."

Mark Templeton is a Canadian experimental electronic artist. Templeton's works are released by New York City record label Anticipate Recordings.

Mike Hovancsek is an American multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and writer. He collaborated with Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh since the late 1980s, and is a former member of the multicultural experimental group, Pointless Orchestra. He plays the guzheng, koto, guitar, waterphone, and percussion, among other instruments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Machinefabriek</span> Dutch musician and graphic designer

Machinefabriek is the musical nom de plume of Dutch musician/sound artist and graphic designer Rutger Zuydervelt.

Stanley Keith Bowsza, better known by the pseudonym Minóy, was an American electronic musician and sound artist. He was a major figure in the DIY noise music and homemade independent cassette culture scene of the 1980s. He released over 100 compositions.

<i>Alice in Wonderland</i> (Neuschwanstein album) 2008 studio album by Neuschwanstein to complete their discography

Alice in Wonderland is the second album by the German progressive rock band Neuschwanstein, although in terms of the recording date it was actually the group's first production, which was also not supposed to be released as an album. Originally intended as a demo tape in 1976, the French label Musea finally released it as a CD in 2008.

References