LISTEN/TRACKS/ORDER | CREDITS

HEARING THE BUZZ

The name "World Music" seems to connote something like "classical or folk music of the non eurocentric world." Which is not quite apt for describing the Buzz. New age music, likewise, seems an inappropriate moniker: It too easily carries an ungrounded, floaty kind of meaning.

Listen: "The Room" Click to Buy

Buzz music is most certainly a music of the spirit: it seems to rise from the earth, it has no edges, only shape and texture, and it breathes and humms with energy - visceral and otherworldly and full of life. Imagine a film zooming over the surface of the whole round earth, translated into sound.

Alan Dumas for the Denver Post translates it well; "The low-frequency hum or buzz he's after, according to Stanwood, is a sound common to all cultures and languages. It's in our speech, our music and the sounds of nature. Even in the absence of sound, the circulation of the blood through our bodies creates the hum inside our ears."

"Out of the North there's a howling,
up from the south there's a hum
threads in a fiber outlasting the earth
in the hands of a weaver become."

SOME ORIGINS

The Buzz as organized by Stanwood first appeared in a live formation known as the Buzz Band. Several of the pieces on Arc of a Buzz found their first homes here. It was said of Buzz concerts that people went out glowing but wouldn't understand why.

Michael, speaking to a reporter, described a 1994 concert thusly: "All human feelings - rage, joy, fear - are superimposed on the buzz. You'll hear enormous range and parts that are calm and others that are fast and bombastic."

The present album is not the Buzz Band transcribed directly from the stage onto disc, though many of the players are the same. It is more an extension and refinement of the spirit of the performances.

Long live the Buzz!

-Jeremiah Moore, October 1999

LISTEN/TRACKS/ORDER | CREDITS