Interview with Howard Stelzer
1. There is a moment in life for every artist and musician to get inspired and move on towards a certain direction and commit to start doing what is closer to your interest? You also have been through different stages in your life related to different genres. Can you describe this (those) moment(s)?
Oh sure, there have been plenty of big life-changing moments like that for me. One was during my first ever tour, back in 2002 (I think?) with Mike Bullock and Jason Talbot. Before then, I had only played concerts at small shows around New York and New England where I knew many of the people in the audience. On this tour, we played 10 consecutive concerts in unfamiliar locations for audiences of mostly strangers. What an exciting shock that was! By playing for strangers night after night, I was able to step outside of my comfort zone and hear more clearly and objectively what I was doing... to notice how people responded (or didn't respond!) to what I was doing. That was when I really began to hear my own music, what its limitations were, and what about the music I wanted to improve. That was impactful, for sure.
Another big moment happened in 2004 when I went to Nijmegen, a small city in the Netherlands near the German border, to record a collaborative album with Giuseppe Ielasi. The experience was made possible through a program called Brombron, which was run by my friend Frans de Waard in collaboration with a Nijmegen arts organization called Extrapool. Before I went to Nijmegen, all of the music that I made was entirely improvised. It wasn't that improvisation was a style that I felt strongly about; I just didn't know how to do anything else. I didn't even know how to improvise very well. Giuseppe and I camped out in Extrapool's recording studio and improvised for a few hours over a couple of days. Then, I got to watch Giuseppe load our sounds into a multi-track program on his laptop and begin to compose with them. He cut them up, edited out some nice passages, applied effects to them, layered some sections... all the usual things that one does to sounds. This may sound ridiculous now, but before that moment in Nijmegen, I had no idea how to compose music at all. I hadn't even considered that such a thing was possible! The experience was such a thunderbolt for me, so inspiring. Soon after I returned home to Boston, I began composing my album "Bond Inlets", which I now consider to be my first entirely successful album.
There were plenty of other significant moments, of course. Meeting Tom Smith (Peach of Immortality, To Live and Shave in LA) when I was 16 years old had a huge impact on me. He generously listened to a tape of my dumb high-school tape-collage music, gave me some feedback and encouragement, and sent me a cassette of his own music in return. That was the first time that any adult took my music seriously. It was so kind of him, I’ll never forget it. After that, I thought differently about the music I was making, that it was maybe not just some ignorant doodlings by a kid in his bedroom but something that other people might actually listen to and consider. When I listened to a tape of abstract music after that, I had a nagging feeling that someday, someone, somewhere could listen to a tape of abstract music that I made.
2. In your work you use tape recorders as your instruments. How did you find your own way towards enjoying and using it for composition? How do you feel about it?
I began making music out of cassettes and tape players when I was a kid in high school, probably around 1990 or so. My friends and I used to bang on metal trash and car parts in my parents' garage, just for fun. We'd keep a cheap boom-box tape recorder running to capture our amateur doodlings onto cassettes. When I listened back to the tapes of the sounds we'd made, I was struck by how different the tape sounded from our actions as they happened live in the room. The concrete garage reflected sounds and the low-quality condenser microphone that was built into the cassette recorder degraded and changed the sounds of loud metal percussion. I loved how little control I had over what those tapes sounded like; the frequencies would be squashed, the microphone overloaded. I began experimenting with cassettes around that time. At first, I used a tape-to-tape copier to make crude pause-button collages. By the mid 1990s, I started to lean on the reels of a shoebox cassette player with my fingers and force the decks to play while simultaneously rewinding or fast-forwarding.
That was ages ago. Now, I record cassettes specifically for whatever composition I'm working on, then I use multi-track software to compose with those tapes. I don't do much digital processing of the tape sounds, but I use a Mac to layer and pan sounds and to apply equalization. Cassettes are still central to what I do. I'll play a tape into one atmosphere (outdoors or in a park or in my laundry room or on my car stereo) and re-record onto a different tape player... over and over until the original sounds are changed beyond recognition.
How do I feel about it? I don't really think about tapes much. They're just what I've always used to make music and so they're what I use today. I made one album, "We All Are", that has no cassettes on it. I like that album and think it still sounds like my voice. But I don't think I'll do that again.
3. Using certain technology to create music is a great idea but can also be a message. What drives you to create sounds using them? How did it evolve over the years of your personal experience?
I think I use cassettes to make my music today mainly because they're what I've used for decades! Habit, I guess. I have no particular love of cassette tapes, though I certainly like the kinds of sounds I can make with them. After doing this for so many years, tapes are just how I think about composition. When I have a musical idea, it always begins with cassette tapes.
As I mentioned earlier, my music began as entirely improvised. But I was never really satisfied by what that stuff sounded like. From 2008 until today, everything I do is meticulously composed in the studio.
4. How do you set up for your live gigs? What approach do you have in terms of composing?
I haven't played a live gig since 2019. I suppose I could be talked into it again one day if someone throws me enough money and promises me a really good sound system and a comfy hotel room. That's unlikely to happen. I can tell you what I used to do for live performances.
My live set for awhile worked like this: I mapped out a piece with each element of each section on a cassette. The tapes were always clearly labeled so that I knew which sounds would happen in order. When I was working out "Across the Blazer", each section of the piece was spread out over six or seven tapes that all had the same sound (or related sounds from the same group) on them, but the sound on each tape was equalized differently. Maybe they ran at slightly different speeds, or with slightly different equalizations, and so on. During the performance, some tape players would be connected through my mixer so that the sounds came out of the PA speakers and could be panned and equalized. Other tape players had built-in speakers that I would play into open air, not going through the PA but just out into the world. A microphone over my table would pick some of that sound up. I'd play one section of the piece, then transition into the second and third section, which each had its own collection of component tapes. I'd also use a laptop to play files of the same sounds as what's on some of the tapes, but equalized in a way that a low-fidelity cassette player just wouldn't capture... like deep clear low frequencies, or details that a normal bias cassette and shitty mono tape player would just render illegible. The contrast of clear detailed versions of sounds coming from the laptop and the same sounds coming out of cassette players both through the PA and into open air is what creates the atmosphere of the piece. In the case of "Across the Blazer", I played that in concert five or six times... in Lowell MA, Boston MA, Philadelphia PA and at the Ende Tymes Festival in New York. Afterwards, all of the recordings of those performances (made directly from the sound board for a nice clean recording and also from a mic in the room that captured the audience sounds and anything that I wasn't routing through the PA speakers) were combined with the original sounds back at my studio and carefully edited/composed until the album emerged.
5. How did you feel about collaborating with anyone before you met? What brought you together and how did you find the communication?
Collaboration is very important to me. For me, music is a language for interacting with the world and communicating with other people. Sometimes that means making music by myself, but I find a lot of value in the exchange of music ideas with other people, allowing those ideas to give me new perspectives and enrich my own life experience.
The first stage of my music was a regular collaboration with a turntable player named Jason Talbot. The two of us were essentially a band. In Boston in the late 90s and early 00s, Talbot and I would perform very frequently. We even went on tour a few times, and we played in the Netherlands (in Rotterdam and Nijmegen) too. That collaborative experience of playing with Talbot taught me so much about making music.
Back when my music was entirely improvised, I'd collaborate with pretty much anyone who asked. I played sets with so many people back then: Will Guthrie, Haco, Otomo Yoshihide, Kevin Drumm, Jack Rose, Audrey Chen, Richard Francis, Martin Tetreault, Jason Soliday, Vic Rawlings, Sawako Kato, Chris Corsano, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jazkamer... and too many more people to list. Live improvisation was certainly formative to my discovering my musical voice. But, as I mentioned earlier, I was never any good at it. When I listen back to those old improv recordings, they sound to me like people thinking out loud, actively searching for the music. They sound unfinished... like a rehearsal or step in the process rather than a piece of music that could stand on its own merits. Some people who are more talented than I am can play improvised music very well, I cannot. And so I stopped doing it.
These days, if I'm going to collaborate with somebody, I want to take plenty of time to build a composition with an equal partner, to really chisel away at sounds until something surprising emerges that neither of us would have produced on our own. My "Suburban Observances" series of albums (there have been five volumes so far, with plans for a sixth) was entirely about that: I sent a bunch of sounds to a lot of people around the world and asked them to process and change the sounds as much as they liked, to render them unrecognizable to me. Then I forced myself to write new music using my own sounds as filtered through other people's perspectives. Writing that music really forced me to rethink my own habits, to push myself into musical areas that I might not have considered on my own. I found it exhilarating. Even though I know that I wrote all the songs on those albums, they sound as if they were made by someone else. I love that!
My general rule for one-on-one collaboration these days is that I want to make music with people who I want to spend time with. AMK, Brendan Murray, Frans de Waard, Brian Grainger, Jeff Barsky... these are folks who I'd just as soon meet for dinner as make music with. To me, collaborating on music with people is so personal, so intimate, so open and generous, that it's an extension of friendship. And so good music arises out of relationships and communication.
6. In an ever changing distribution of music how do you see your place and how do you feel about physical releases?
I prefer for my work to appear as physical releases, but with streaming versions also. I'm not as interested in releasing albums that don't also have a physical version. But I have no real idea how music distribution or sales works these days. I ran a small label from 1997 until 2012 and was awful at it. I have no desire to do that again, and haven't educated myself about what that world even looks like nowadays. I'm happy to let other people handle it.
7. Could you tell us a bit about your latest album Five Thousand Pretenders Who Passed the Test By Luck Alone?
I don't ever want to make an album that can be neatly summed up with a genre name... a drone album or a noise album or a minimal album or.... you get the idea. I make whatever music seems right to me at the time, then let other people decide what it is. That's what "Five Thousand..." is; it's the music that made sense to me while I was making it. My goal with it was... intuitive, I guess? I had made albums of massive, heavy sounds... and albums of short song-like pieces... so I suppose I wanted this to be a more inwards-focused album. There isn't a big sunrise catharsis... it starts with motion and grows more subtle over time. I wanted to make headphone music... private music... not ambient or background or drone (that doesn't interest me), but music that pulls listeners in and forces a certain concentration. I wanted music that maintains a tension for the duration... that someone can sink into and notice hidden details and layers upon layers of sounds in conversation with one another.
8.Plans for the future?
Sure! I'm working on more music with Extra, which is my ongoing and fruitful collaboration with Brian Grainger. There will be a new Extra album called "Sieving/Other" coming out as a CD on Rural Isolation Project later this year. Buried In Slag and Debris will be publishing my collaboration with ABH/Nobuo Yamada as a double-tape called "Mathematic Sun" this summer, as I mentioned earlier. I've got a collaborative piece with PBK called "She Thinks She's the State Department" coming out late Summer or early Fall on Love Earth Music. I've got some more things in very early stages, but I work too slowly to say anything concrete about them.
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