Recycled by Howard Stelzer
She said "Aye, I know you and you cannot sing." I said, "That's nothing, you should hear the tape I made for RRRecords 20 years ago."
This is one of the first recordings of mine to be published, a strange little tape made for RRR's "Recycled" series. Side A was composed in my first real studio, soon after I moved to Massachusetts from Florida. I have almost no recollection of what I used for source sounds, or much else about the piece. There was an earlier four-part composition I made for Jos Smolders' EARlabs which was built out of raw walkman recordings of me riding the subway and banging on metal pipes (hey gimme a break, I was young!). This piece MIGHT have been made out of the same material. Sadly, I've lost those masters, so I can't verify the (in)accuracy of my memory. It's just as well.
Side B was recorded live at the second (I think?) concert I ever played in MA, an afternoon show in some guy's recording studio space in a rural town called Ayer. If I recall correctly, Skin Crime played after me. Or maybe it was Crank Sturgeon? Back in eastern MA in 1999, odds were it would have been one or the other. One of the benefits of performing at his space was getting a nice professional-quality recording of your set, a perk that was clearly wasted on some kid banging out trash like this from normal-bias tapes blasting from tiny little practice amps.
Credits
Originally published as a cassette by RRRecords sometime in 1998 or 1999. I really don't remember.
License
All rights reserved.Tags
Stelzer's music is assembled out of cassette tapes, tape machines, and a stubborn refusal to admit defeat. He & his family live on a small farm in rural MA. At night, he hunches over piles of plastic, wires & little boxes and makes this stuff. No one knows why.
"I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares." - Saul Bass