New Albums:
The Crossing (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), to be released April 2018 by Flag Day Recordings as a limited-edition cassette tape, digital download and full-color book with stills from Joe Taylor’s film and an essay by the composer.
A Strange Object Covered With Fur Which Breaks Your Heart, to be released April 2018 by No Rent Records as a limited-edition cassette tape and digital download.
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Performance: info here
Non-Event, the Goethe-Institut Boston, and SMFA Library Sounds present
THOMAS LEHN / MARCUS SCHMICKLER
analogue & digital synthesizers in QUAD
HOWARD STELZER
performing “Crossing Parallel” for digital video & ~20 cassette players
School of the Museum of Fine Arts Anderson Auditorium
230 The Fenway, Boston
7pm
Tickets: $15 gen admission | $10 students + Non-Event members
FREE for SMFA students
MARCUS SCHMICKLER (digital synthesizer & computer) and THOMAS LEHN (analogue synthesizer) first worked together in December 1998 as members of the storied electro-acoustic ensemble, Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra (aka MIMEO) in Cologne almost twenty years ago. Since then, they have collaborated extensively, touring in Europe, the USA and Japan, and performing at Experimental Intermedia, Mills College, Bard, Lampo, Princeton, and more. They released several highly-acclaimed recordings on labels, such as A-Musik, Mikroton, and Editions Mego. Their debut release, BART, on Erstwhile, is one of the high-water marks of contemporary synthesizer music. This is their second duo performance with Non-Event.
HOWARD STELZER is a composer of electro-acoustic music. Almost all of his sounds are generated by, processed by, recorded onto and played back out of cassette tapes and consumer-grade tape players. He isn’t sure how most of these things work. Stelzer operated the Intransitive Recordings label from 1997 until 2012. When he is not composing, Stelzer is a middle school math teacher in Lowell, MA, where he lives with his family in a big room behind a power plant.
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, a local agency which is funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and admistrated by the Mayor’s Office of Arts + Culture.
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New album: Stelzer/Murray Connector (Helen Scarsdale, US)
from the label:
“Stelzer/Murray is the duo of Brendan Murray and Howard Stelzer, two stalwarts of the Boston noise / experimental scene over the past two decades. both artists have long been friends and both artists have never shied away from collaborating with avant-garde musicians hither and yon. yet, this marks their first collaborative work together. better late than never, we say.
Stelzer brings to the table an array of mangled and partially demagnetized tape; and Murray brings his knack for compacted harmonics, obfuscated field recordings, and long-view compositional strategies. an irradiated, almost kirlian glow permeates connector through the duo’s slow accretions and erosions amidst the soaring crescendos of compacted tone and vacant shadows of mechanical thrum. on occasion, rasping saw tooth frequencies and oblique synth-noise phrases stridently pop in a clinical opposition against the field of hiss. screaming cascades from ice storms. tape symphonies from urban blight. life-support machines at the point of obsolescence.
In describing the process of building this album, Stelzer reflected, “when you’ve known someone for this long, the act of collaboration is like conversation over dinner; you don’t fuss over it or worry about it; it’s stress free, even instinctual like exhaling.”
good things come to those who wait.
