Music
I listen to mad amounts of music - in fact, I enjoy scarcely a waking moment that isn’t in some way properly scored. I enjoy virtually every form of music ever created: classic rock and indie rock and krautrock, doo-wop, industrial, electroclash, oldskool country and oldskool rap, New Wave, Newer wave, synthpop, most forms of METAAAAALLLLL (with the exception of “black metal,” which I just find boring and repetitive), experimental electronic weirdness, ambient, Gregorian chants, klezmer, polkas, Tuvan throat music…you name it, I probably listen to it. My media-player library is currently at something like 88,000 songs, and could play nonstop for the next ninety days without repeating a song.
But I don’t just sit around and listen to stuff: I write a great deal of music, as well, and am currently setting up an online indie “label”, HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania, to distribute said music under Creative Commons licenses because, of course, the RIAA, Major Labels, and the entire Music Industry can collective kiss my ass. Though I don’t identify musicmaking as anything more than a singularly diverting and pleasant hobby (those who define music as “their life” need to get a life…and a real job, for that matter), it is a VERY important diversion—and one that I pursue with as much seriousness as I can dedicate to anything. I make music to entertain myself and others, and as such I don’t much care about making money from it, and loathe the thought of binding up my work in ludicrous, outdated copyright issues. As long as people are Out There enjoying the stuff I produce, then I’m perfectly happy. Sample it, trade it, remix it…I don’t care—just remember to follow the Creative Commons licenses and give a brotha proper credit!
You can find samples of my work many places online. HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania would be a good place to start—but even after two years it’s still heavily Under Construction. For convenience’s sake, though, I’ve set up MySpace.com sites for all of my major projects: each page features tracks which can be streamed and/or downloaded, as well as information about the projects such as the myriad silly fake names I work under for shits n’ giggles. At any rate, you can find links to these pages under the PEGRITZMUZIK heading to the right, and below as well, plus more information or giddy blather about my various musical incarnations.
At present, these are my primary musical endeavours:
Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos
Nyarlathotep is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, my oldest and most important (to me, that is) musical project–dating all the way back to 1993, when I wrote my very first MOD using four or five awful, 8-bit drum sounds and a couple of samples of my friend Bighead screaming “TONIGHT YOU SLEEP IN HELL!” and uploaded it to a local TAG BBS under the name Nyarlathotep, The Crawling Chaos. Since then, Nyarlathotep has grown like a tide of vicious nanoreplicators obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft and related eldritch horrors. The Chaos is no longer just me and my computer, but has grown to include a wide number of my friends as well, particularly master synthesist/noise guru aRvin Clay, guitarist Jeremy Long and composer Alexx Reed from ThouShaltNot, Megan Irvine on violin, Mike Violette on drums, and oftimes circuitbending experimental noodler Corey Appleby on…well, whatever it is he plays. But the full roster of Nyarlathotep can, anymore, number in the hundreds considering how many people I like to work with at one time. We released our first album, Ia!, on Optikon Rekords back in 1999…but are currently completely re-recording it for an even bigger, stranger release packed with cringing IDM beats, amorphous ambience, gibbering synths, and fungous samples straight from the frigid, daemoniac cloisters of Unknown Kadath. In the last two years, though, we’ve put out two EPs of music inspired by the works of Caitlin R. Kiernan, certainly the greatest contemporary inheritor of Lovecraft’s legacy of the mindstretchingly bizarre, which were both released along with special editions of her work through Subterranean Press. Since I generally take so much inspiration for Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos’s music from written material, chances are that we’ll be putting out a LOT more of these “book soundtracks” in the future!
Derek C. F. Pegritz
The “solo” material I’ve been releasing under my own, untouched moniker is, obviously, the most personal to me…and generally the darkest, most despairing work I’ve ever done. I recently finished a “trilogy” of depression ambient works collectively entitled The Suberranean Passage: three EPs of leaden, corrosive dronescapes and ultra-minimalistic sound collages that detail my recovery from a particularly bad breakup in terms of strange, ritualistic noises. More recently, however, I’ve taken a much more IDM/industrial-meets-gothrock sort of bent with the album I’m currently working on, Malpractice, which is slated to become a collection of thirteen or so twitchy, incredibly dense jams exploring via sustained metaphors of disease and medical negligence all the emotional ways one human can permanently injure another. Yeah. I’ve got issues. Volumes and volumes of them! But what better way to just work them out and use them for something constructive than writing music about them? Trent Reznor made a billion dollars doing it; so can I.
Retar-D2
Not all the music I write is about cosmic horrors threatening to erase humanity from the galactic scene for no reason whatsoever, or about my miserable interpersonal relationships! I like to write dance music, as well: bouncy, blippy, robotic funk that recalls the glory days of Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa, Gary Numan and Landscape. One day, I started building a booty-rockin’ house jam out of some old 606/909 drum sounds and a number of samples that I made by recording noises from my ancient Atari 2600 while I was playing Missile Command and Pac-Man. It turned out to be so awesome, I knew at that moment a whole new music project had been born! Pretty soon, I had the perfect name for it: Retar-D2 - named after a robot pictured in the liner notes of my alltime favorite Newer Wave album, the Pulsars’ self-titled debut. And then the “band concept” quickly followed: I was the “human component,” and my computer (which actually does all the sequencing and stuff) became “Robot of the future.” Together, we make booty music for 8-bit robots. EXTERMINATE!
A Doctrine of Works
What do you get when you take elements of soulful, funky house music and brutally rape it with heavy beats and machine noises stolen blatantly from early-1990s industrial dance? Pure crap. But danceable crap, I can tell you that! A Doctrine of Works began as my attempt at a house music project, but of course I couldn’t just throw down some 120bpm shuffled beats and toss in a bassline and some keys and just consider it done - nooooooo, I had to fuck it up somehow by rearranging drum loops at random, programming spastic breaks that come out of nowhere, twisty basslines and weird FX sequences, and just generally taking a few otherwise boring, repetitive house jams and mutating them into musical polemics against static compositional forms. I have no idea where any of this stuff comes from: it’s like I just lose my mind and let the Silliness Factor completely take over my musical ability, thereby generating some very fun, if very abstract, dance songs that no one on earth will ever be able to actually dance to. Sure, I’m not the only member of A Doctrine of Works: three or four of my other personalities show up as well, get really drunk, and do the majority of the work while my higher brain functions shuffle off to ponder transhuman ethics or the aesthetics of Gothic architecture. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything A Doctrine of Works puts out–it’s all just fun and games. And ambiguous mythology.
Aaaaand, finally…I recently set up a MySpace page for my house-music project, DJ Heauxmeaux. I’ll have a shorter icon for this project as soon as my overworked as can find a moment in photoshop to use the crop tool. Basically, DJ Heauxmeaux started as a dare. Most of my friends knew I loved gay-bar house music (hey, it’s funky and easy to dance to), but no one thought I could actually write it. So, I proved their asses seriously wrong when I produced the song “The Gay! (It’s Catching)” back in December 2005. I’ve finally decided that the music actually is good enough to be worth exposing to the world, so I’ve made a MySpace page for my “fauxmosexual” alter-ego and have started work on a few more giddy, goofy, disco-fied house songs. Expect an EP or something coming out one of these days, as with everything else. And I swear I’ll find a better picture for this project than some tanned, buff dummy in a Santa hat.
