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CHOP SHOP - Oxide

Format: CD
Label & Cat.Number: 23five Incorporated 23FIVE 012
Release Year: 2007
Note: lim. 500 with extra cardboard envelope & embossing
Price (incl. 19% VAT): €13.00
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Neben den HATERS ist CHOP SHOP der S-amerikanische Spezialist für den "Klang des Zerfalls" und Konzept-Noise; bei diesem neuen one-tracker (49 Minuten Länge) benutzt er alte & sich auflösende (oxidierende) Tapes und Tonbänder aus seinem Archiv und präsentiert als Ergebnis dissoziierte Geräusch-Drones und "kaputten" Maschinen-Lärm, wie man ihn konsequenter kaum zu hören bekommt... viele cut-ups, verschiedene Noise-Schichten; innere Veränderungen des Klangs, Übersteuerungen & Knacksen & Störgeräusche werden hörbar gemacht, vieles davon unglaublich "low-fi" & rauschig... das ist "recycled sound" par excellence!

"This filled me with much pleasure, as I never expected this. Towards the end of the 80s and in the early 90s, when we were still firm industrial music lovers, Chop Shop was one of our heroes. Not because he was so incredible loud, but his loudspeaker installations looked raw and sounded good. No, actually they sounded 'rusty', as well as a rusty look. Through his speaker installations Chop Shop, the one man band of Scott Konzelmann fed a blend of decayed sounds, taken from all sorts of machinery, sonic residue taped on cheap cassette tape or reel to reel tape machines. Much more serious in his approach than the average noise maker, Konzelmann was already more a visual artist than a musician. I have no idea why he 'left' the scene, or why we didn't hear his name that much in the last ten years, but it's good to hear 'Oxide'. Salvaged from old, damaged tapes, which caused 'flaking, static, dropouts and print through'. If you never saw or heard a cassette or a reel tape - and in these digital days that is probably a lot of people - it's hard to understand what static or dropouts are. Listening to 'Oxide' is a like being transported back in time, to the era of cassettes, hiss, when the music dropped a bit due to an imperfection of the cassette tape. Konzelmann takes all of these sounds, of pure hiss, of loud machine noise, of decay, of erosion and creates his 'Oxide' piece with it. He deliberately leaves in the 'unwanted' breaks, the mistakes and the faults, but his piece is, at least for me who heard pretty much everything of his 'old' music, a true delight. Great to see this on CD and becoming more easy to access, but surely its time to out some of the older releases and have a nostalgic evening of humming noise." [FdW / Vital Weekly]

"Akita. Menche. Blankenship. Dilloway. These are the men of noise with discographies the size of small town phone books, proving their might in the international noise community by the sheer audaciousness of their output. But then again, you might really only need a single testament to stake your claim as one of the greatest noise musicians. Chop Shop has chosen the latter tactic, with Oxide being that sole document, after a relatively tiny back catalogue of cassette only releases, a couple of cdrs, and two infamous 10"s. Both released through RRR, the first was the Steel Plate 2x10" that was literally bound to a steel plate; and the second was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party that was literally cut in half, making playback a dangerous proposition for the needle on your record player. Both of those releases have long been out of print; and despite the hushed respect that those 10"s demand, Chop Shop has kept a low profile. A very low profile. Hence, after a career that has spanned nearly two decades, Oxide is his first proper CD. And it's stunning.
The sole proprietor of Chop Shop is New York based noise technician Scott Konzelmann, whose audio demolition revolves around speaker constructions forged out of hammered plate metal and disfigured commercial grade pipes, which focus particular frequencies and resonant overtones into swarming orchestras of rust, noise, drone, and static. Tape has long been Konzelmann's medium of choice for recording; and like William Basinski before him, Konzelmann endures the self-disintegration of the medium whilst transcribing the sounds of Oxide digitally. Where Basinski's vocabulary of decay is all romance and melancholy, Konzelmann's is muscular and urgently present. Oxide offers a metallurgist's din where compressed air strikes hard steel and machine vibrations generate noxious resonant frequencies in neighboring vents. Konzelmann composes the old school way, with a razor blade and pieces of tape, generating jump cut edits alongside the self-generated debris from the magnetic literally falling apart. These grey, dead-tech drones thus rupture and explode along the faultlines of those edits, and Oxide emerges as a forceful, dynamic album without resorting to purile shock tactics. This is a seriously great noise album for anybody with a passing interest in Broken Flag, Hansen Records, or early Hafler Trio."" [Aquarius Records review]


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