Howard Stelzer & Jason Talbot - Songs
(Intransitive)
Michael Bullock's liner notes to Songs deal partially with the definition of the tracks on the disc in relation to the traditional idea of what makes a song, a somewhat pointless semantic exploration, especially when Bullock ends it in a noncommittal urging for the listener to make up their own mind. What's interesting about Songs isn't whether or not one can state with certainty whether or not Stelzer and Talbot have constructed "songs," but rather the duo's distinctive means of sound production and the products thereof.
With Stelzer manning a tape machine and Talbot making use of a turntable, it's easy to imagine Songs as a long tableaux of ambient soundscapes, warped 78rpm samples, and found snippets of tape run in reverse. Instead, the results are far more visceral. Rather than using the usual production medium of their instruments as their sound sources (i.e.: records and the tape itself), Stelzer and Talbot, as often as not, use the machines themselves to create the sounds. Stelzer modifies his tape players' output by manipulating its inner workings with his hands during playback, and, from listening to Songs it's questionable whether Talbot's tone arm ever touches vinyl, as his sounds emanate more from the "prepared" turntable unit and its various parts. These unconventional ways of eliciting sounds from their instruments allow Stelzer and Talbot to redefine their instruments' normal output into completely new forms. In Talbot's hands, his turntable emits the resonant sounds of scraping, jostling, and other abuse of its body and mechanics, with even the sound of his hands tapping the body of the instrument providing a deep rumbling. Stelzer wrangles short bursts of warped tape noise, twisting the source material into warbled waves and wrung-out slices of sound. Both are adept at strangling the emissions of their tools almost immediately, creating percussive and jarring bits of abrasion.
Though it may sound as though it could easily be crowded and overbearing at times, Songs is a CD of measured restraint and a blend of brain and brawn. There are plenty of silent moments between Stelzer and Talbot's outbursts, a silence that can serve as both a tool of tension and release. The short duration of the tracks also lends itself well to a more accessible listen, if the word "accessible" can be used to describe Songs' music. Stelzer and Talbot, savants in their own little word of sound construction, wrestle musique concrete into their own more DIY surroundings and put a microscope on the mechanics of their instruments, whose focus shifts from sound replication to the production of a whole new musical dialect, a forced education, it could be said, in an exotic foreign language.
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