Howard STELZER
“Bond inlets”

“Ten years after his debut CD, Stone Blind (Intransitive, 1997), Howard Stelzer presents Bond Inlets, his first widely available solo cassette-tape composition. Boston-based sound artist Stelzer was never happy with his first album, and threw away most of the pressing as soon as it returned from the factory. He took the occasion of his label’s tenth anniversary to dissect the source sounds of that work and filter it through the lens of the interceding decade in order to build a piece that more accurately reflects what his intentions were then and what his aesthetic is today. Bond Inlets is subtly emotional work of foreground drone that beats its head against the plastic walls of cassette-tape technology, laying bare the physicality of the process of its creation. The dying motors of cassette players, tape-saturated percussion, and blown-out condenser-mic wail are mixed with elements of new live improvisations and field recordings taken in his neighborhood to create oceans full of no-fidelity murk and evocative hiss. There is an implacable melancholy to Bond Inlets, with fragments of distant melodies that surface only to be subsumed again into the grime.”