Member Since: 7/26/2006
Band Website: WWW.CUONGVU.COM
Band Members:Cuong Vu Trio -
STOMU TAKEISHI - Plays electric bass altered, agitated, and transformed by electronics and loopers, toggling between Etheral Sounds and Aggressive Urban Noises -TED POOR - Plays the drums and various metals from Home Depot, Lowes, and True Value Hardware stores
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CUONG VU - Plays "Weird-assed-Trumpet-shit"(real quote), employing miscellaneous, obsolete guitar pedals. He's also the Scribbler/Organizer/Notater/Conceptualist of musical ideas/subjects/objects for the band to look at, be perplexed by, and then ignore.
Influences: In in the last 5 - 10 years, the main people whose music have affected, informed, and/or inspired my ideas and aspirations in music, while sometimes making me scratch my head, are -Bjork, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot, Aphex Twin, D'Angelo, Cynthia Hopkins, Helmut Lachenmann, Stina Nordenstam, Gyorgi Ligeti, Tyondai Braxton, Autechre, Arto Lindsay - there are a bunch more...just can't remember them right now...
Sounds Like: Too hard for an inarticulate person (me) to articulate...but some writers have described the music as -"an acoustic hall of mirrors"
-"It's pure art. There's dark-darkness, joyful lament...and everything about anguish and despair in flat, naked beauty...it will shake you."
-"Its about crafting haunting soundscapes"
-"The first sounds you hear on Cuong Vu's new album are ethereal trumpet moans joined by equally otherworldly clusters of notes emanating from a guitar. These sounds herald the beginning of a musical marriage made in electronic heaven"
-"musical trip through life - a life conceptualized as dense urbanized noise-scapes - intercut with advancing and receding episodes of pastoral calm. Vu's music is a living residue of journeys taken and journeys returned from, in sound."
-"seems to have created the jazz version of a rock music power trio...an out-and-out rocker, complete with auditorium shaking drumbeats and Brontosaurus tooth chomping bass rhythm"
Record Label: ArtistShare
Type of Label: Indie