Howard Stelzer

Howard Stelzer - Bond Inlets

Intransitive Recordings 030

In 1997 Boston based composer and tape manipulator Howard Stelzer released an album called Stone Blind using little else but old cassette tapes and their players. Unfortunately for us Stelzer was less than happy with the result and rather than release an inferior product he trashed most of the pressing and sat on the masters. For ten years.

Cue the tenth anniversary of his Intransitive label and Stelzer decides its time to revisit those original recordings and take them apart and put them back together again using the passing ten years of accrued tape manipulation knowledge to create, according to the press patter ‘a piece that more accurately reflects what his intentions were then and what his aesthetic is today’.

But Stelzer doesn’t just sit there with his finger on the pause button making squidgy sounds, there’s an obsessive at work here. A curious obsessive creating sounds that one would never in a bazillion years think originated from the humble tape and their players. For these are drone works on a grand scale crafted and filled with the minutiae of busted condenser mics, grimed out ghosts of tape data, wheezing tape spools and fingered reels. There’s huge clanging drones that sound like church bells heard through the fog at Paschandaele, drones that could be the sound of distant traffic coming at you through a long mountain tunnel in Norway. Both these nigh on thirty minute untitled tracks are melancholic drone trip fer sure but they’re ones that have been on repeat here for the past few weeks and I am in awe. Each travel a melancholic path that takes in wheezing tape-deck motors, busted mics, trapped tape, snapped tape, empty players spinning on fast forward, shit I don’t know how he does it but what I do know is that he’s trying to use tape as a tool, as an instrument to create a sound that it wasn’t originally intended to. Tapes can be instruments as much as turntables kiddo, you just have to know what to do with them and Stelzer certainly does.

The last thing I heard by Stelzer was a live track on ‘Tomorrow No One Will Be Safe’ [Pacrec - www.iheartnoise.com] a head woozying blast of tape dexterity that swam in and out of my vision like psychedelic goldfish. Bond Inlets shows that there’s more than one string to this mans bow.

PO BOX 39151

Cambridge

MA 02139

USA

www.intransitiverecordings.com

Incapacitants

Incapacitants - Burning Orange

Pica Disk CD 2008 PICA006

No doubt about it anymore, Japanese noise duo Incapacitants are quite simply the best noise band on the planet right now. As I sit here twiddling with my overgrown face fuzz I still think back to that magical night at No Fun where the classic Incapacitants line up of Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai shook the place to the ground with an intense set of mind boggling psychedelic noise fizz that drew comparisons with sightings of the Holy Mother and trips to Lourdes. For as Tommi Keränen so rightly states in his excellent liner notes, an Incapacitants live show ‘has a power of near religious proportions’.

Live shows outside their own country though are as rare a sight as Keiji Heino in a straw boater but Lasse Marhaug persuaded them to travel to Oslo for the 2006 All Ears Festival and this here disc is evidence of that trip. As you would expect from the Incaps its a blistering set. Nearly thirty minutes of high density, red level madness akin to an army of androids malfunctioning in shorting random spastic attacks as you try to hold on to a loose whip cracking high voltage cable. What amazes me about their sets is that the intensity rarely slips and somewhere along the line you’re going to hit your own personal blissful moment of trancedental delight. If you ever get to see them live you’ll see it on the punters faces. Its an incredible sight. Somewhere near the end of this set as the signals begin to cut out you can just about hear the audience starting to shriek and holler their approval. At the end it’s genuine heart felt applause and its for two men who are revered and held in high esteem by noise aficionados the world over. By day the Incapacitants work for the Japanese banking industry and the government in turn. Its worth remembering this if you ever get to see them because they don’t get up their in suits and sit behind a desk, they get involved, shake and tremble, scream into mics, sweat, get delirious with the sheer power of the noise they create. As your senses are being shoved out the cracks in your skull and the hairs on your legs shiver with delight its worth remembering this. To see them live is a privilege and as I recently saw at Instal 08, people will travel many miles to see them, to soak up the special atmosphere they create, to pay homage to the greatest live noise bandß of them all.

There’s an additional track on here too in which liner note writer Tommi Keränen joins them for a similar length set billed as Fumio Tommikawa and after a hesitant start that too delivers. Noise never sounded so good.

www.picadisk.com

Andrew Paine & Richard Youngs

Andrew Paine & Richard Youngs - 1958/Santos

Sonic Oyster Record. CDR

Picked a couple of Sonic Oyster discs up at the Volcanic Tongue stall at Instal 08. I was probably drunk and gurning at Keenan’s missus at the time. Oh you can have these as trades for all the stuff you sent she tells me in her American drawl. Cheers our kid I reply in my best heavy woollen tones whilst snaffling them into a pocket and keeping them there whilst I slept on sofas and ate chips and deep fried sausages and fell asleep during three hour skronk outs because I’d been deprived of my eight hours and comfy bed and Weetabix and replaced it all with J&B and crafty fags and veg curries at three in the afternoon.

And after a very pleasant journey home down the west coast mainline in glorious winter sunshine I returned to Idwal Towers and in the best of moods I stuck 1958 into the slot and the room filled with the sound of a Glaswegian raga. Because both Youngs and Paine and [by implication] Sonic Oyster Records are Glasgow based. Young plays the bass and a Japanese flute going by the name of a Shakuachi whilst Paine plays electric guitar and percussion. Add all that to Youngs lost sounding, solitary note bass plucks over that lonesome flute and you have a 24 minute mind healing joss stick session in your hands. There’s more to these 24 minutes than that though, at times I feel as if I’m in In-di-ah and the Ibex are on the dusty red horizon others I’m in the spaces that Throbbing Gristle used to occupy on works like Hometime, drifting electric winds of grizzled melancholy. Better than a massage. Well almost.

1958’s second track Armorial Sands drifts in like a B-movie flying saucer before setting up a peppy chakra beat that collapses into scatter drum shots and a crescendo of warbling flute and bass runs. Both tracks leave me in a sate of bliss hit repeat-ness. Paine and Youngs have worked their magic over me. Their sounds settle like dust motes through a sunlit window and best of all remain unclassifiable. In a genre filled world this is manna from heaven.

Santos is equally as beguiling although the trips are shorter. Paine and Young are credited with cymbals, drums, gongs, ring modulation and shortwave amongst the Shakuachi breaths.

Besides working with each other on numerous releases they have each in turn interbred with multifarious dabblers of the sonic arts and released a staggering amount of music. Sonic Oyster Records is Paines own imprint and worthy of further investigation.

http://www.myspace.com/sonicoysterrecords