Howard Stelzer

February 2021 news

I’m hard at work on the next big project, a series of albums that I’m calling Observances. Last year, I sent the same group of sounds to lots of different artists and ask them to manipulate/transform them as much as possible and then return them to me. I’ve been composing new music out of these manipulated sounds, hearing myself refracted through the lens of other people’s perspectives… a project based on empathy, communication, re-evaluation. Participants include Craig Johnson/Rovellasca, Theresa Smith, France Jobin, Roel Meelkop, Blake Edwards/Vertonen, Hali Palombo, Melanie O’Dubhslaine, Phil Todd/Ashtray Navigations, Andrew Zukerman/Fleshtone Aura, Theo Gowans/Territorial Gobbing, Joe Murray/Posset, Frans de Waard, Tori Kudo, Andrea Pensado, Stuart Chalmers, Fraser Burnett/Fordell Research Unit, Ross Scott-Buccleuch/Diurnal Burdens and more.

Some planned upcoming releases for later this year:

HS & Expose Your Eyes One Should Never Cease Considering Human Love, Which Remains as Grisly and Golden as Ever CD (Oxidation) – a tectonic-event stomper by me and Paul Harrison (aka Expose Your Eyes, Mr Avuncular Crepuscular, Hairs Abyss etc), one heavy bastard of an album overloaded with fried electronics and in-the-red tape… special limited art edition will come inside a black hardback book signed by both of us.

HS & Thaniel Ion Lee Folie a Deux 3 split 4″ lathe-cut record & CDR (Humanhood) – a hand-cut 4″ vinyl record with one short solo track by each of us, plus a split CDR with another longer solo track by each of us.

Stelzer/Murray Commit LP (Helen Scarsdale) – the long-awaited third album by me and Brendan Murray, and our first on wax. We’re very excited about this one and thrilled to return to our pal Jim Haynes‘ Helen Scarsdale imprint.

HS Untitled lathe-cut CD (Tribe Tapes) – format confusion alert! Two short tracks hand-cut onto one side of a CD. Edition size befits the potential market for such playback tomfoolery. No digital will be available for this release.

HS & Stuart Chalmers The Extenuating Circumstance and All That It Implies cassette (Opal Tapes) – solo and collaborative music

new!

IT’S ALIVE! The new album, Invariably Falling Forward, Into the Thickets of Closure, is an epic triple-CD set on No Rent Records. This is the major statement that I’ve been working on for a year and half or so… it sorta picks up where Anathematization… left off, with songlike forms pushed even more in the direction of (gulp) dub, disco, pop tunes as well as the torrential cassette-scramble typhoons you’ve come to expect. Someone told me that this is the HS album you can dance to. Sure, why not. Includes contributions from Windy Weber (Windy & Carl), Peter Hope, Peter Wright, Elisabeth King, Tom Smith, Jeff Barsky/Insect Factory, Sarah Hennies, Audrey Chen, Michael Anderson/Drekka, Antony Milton, Stephen Clover/Seht, Bill Ironfield… and cover/package design by the inimitable Matthew Revert.

*******

HS & Steffan de Turck For Charlie Mopps is out now as a cassette on Steep Gloss. Copies bought direct from the label come with a key (like, the kind you might put into a door or use to open a bottle) that has a unique download code for an additional track.

out next!

HS & Expose Your Eyes One Should Never Cease Considering Human Love, Which Remains as Grisly and Golden as Ever CD (Oxidation, US)

HS & Peter Wright Utsuro-bune tape (Chemical Imbalance, Australia)