Randy Greif is an American auditory artist who has been
releasing music since the mid 1970s, both on his own label,
Swinging Axe Productions, and on other people's labels. Greif often incorporates electronic and concrete music with spoken word, "sound theater" and various field recordings. Common features in Greif's work are dense layers of atmospherics, cut-up vocals and shifting minimalistic rhythms. His music is often described as "dark" and "hallucinatory."
Swinging Axe Productions started in 1983 and for the first years after its founding released only a few cassette-only releases with such well-known names as Japanese noise-artist Merzbow and industrial group Controlled Bleeding. Greif has recorded stuff under many different aliases, such as Screaming Dukduks, Shadowbug 4 and others.
One of Randy Greif's most interesting works to date is his 6 hour musical and textural adaption of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland". The spoken text of the story is often cut up in tiny pieces of sound and then reconstructed to form whole words again. It took Greif five years to complete this project and it was released serially on the Dutch Staalplaat label. An odd thing about these CDs was that, in order to get the fifth and final CD in the set, you had to cut out and send in coupons from the four previous CDs. The whole set has later been re-released on Soleilmoon Recordings where this procedure was not necessary. Anyway, this music is a true psychedelic experience and is strongly recommended for those interested in this sort of thing.
One of Randy Greif's releases from later years is Verdi's Requiem that came out on the Soleilmoon label in 1997. This is an attempt to abstract the events of Verdi's life in terms of music. These events, however, have little to do with what really happened. They are all imagined by Greif himself.
For more information about Randy Greif see http://www.swingingaxe.com/