Torn Tongue

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A recycling project begun with Howard recording a friend’s voice for a gallery show, then manipulating the voice beyond recognition as such and asking Frans to take it even further, to which Howard manipulated it again. numbered edition of 150 copies in circular sleeve.

Recorded 1997 – 2002 in Gainesville (Fl), Boston (Ma), and Nijmegen (Neth).

“Frans de Waard seems to like business card CD-Rs, and he regularly releases some on his Moll imprint, the latest one being a collaborative work by himself and Howard Stelzer. Each of the two has one track and I guess they exchanged source material and then worked individually on their respective pieces. Stelzer is of course well known for his tape manipulation techniques, which dissolve all information originally stored on the tape into blasts of abstract noise. However, rather than the start/stop-aesthetic that I would have expected from him, his piece on this CD-R is an almost static drone. Even at just over two minutes in length it is utterly captivating because of its textural quality; it consists of a thick hissing sound, which occasional reveals some tiny acoustic details, and stays as minimal as complex throughout. Frans’ track is then much more dynamic, a fragmented composition based on processed bits of what I would guess to have been burst of tape noise. It is a solid, OK piece of abstract digital noise – quality stuff, albeit not really surprising. In the context of this short release it does make perfect sense, though, and the juxtaposition of two distinct aesthetic approaches makes for a good five-minute release.” MSS