Recent Work by HS & Jason Talbot

This live document was recorded in 2002 at the now-legendary AvanTronics Festival, hosted by Mike Shiflet in Columbus, Ohio. I call the festival legendary because so much was set in motion there: friendships, collaborations, albums, inspiration. I first met Spencer Yeh at AvanTronics, when he handed me a copy of his debut LP as Burning Star Core. Keith Whitman was there, still performing frenetic dance music as Hrvastki. Blake Edwards (one of my favorite people, who would later tour with Jason and publish stuff by us on his excellent CIP label) played a set as Vertonen. Greg Davis was there, and so was VV/Ven Voisey (now a well-known installation artist). Mike would go on to publish music by both Jason and me, and years later he would design most of the covers for my Intransitive Recordings label. Mike managed to galvanize a whole bunch of creative young Columbus artists by way of his Gameboy label and the frequent music events he'd host at local galleries, restaurants, his living room... anywhere. The best of the Columbus venues was BLD, a large warehouse space that people used for art studios. It had a down-to-earth positive atmosphere, quite comfortable and welcoming in a college-town art-students sorta way. Nothing like it existed in Boston. That's where he decided to hold a two-night electronic music festival.

So how did we get there? Jason and I were on tour with Kapotte Muziek. We drove from Boston all the way to Detroit, down through Chicago for two nights (KM played twice at Lampo, while I entered myself into a "cassette jockey" tournament and was soundly, deservedly defeated by Andy Ortmann), then east through Ohio and Pennsylvania and back home. We were having a blast on tour. Each set was better than the last. We were like athletes in training, getting faster and weirder and more muscular as we went on. Our sets were marked by false starts, telepathic time/density shifts, absurd bravado, and sarcastic jokes directed toward the audience and to each other. All the coiled energy from sitting in a car for hours talking about music and records and music again would explode like water from a firehose, a high-pressure blast. The set that Jason and I played at AvanTronics was particularly fierce. Happy and full of twitchy self-confidence, we fed off the positive energy of the audience at BLD and produced some oddly-shaped shards.

Now fast forward to later that year. Jason and I were to do a short tour with Emil Beaulieau/Ron Lessard and Sudden Infant. Ron wanted to make some CDRs for us to sell on the road, so we offered this recording. Jason had graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and I was in grad school there at the time, so we selected a silly title to reference our art cred. The track titles were named after some of our actual jobs. Fast forward even further to 2012: Jason moved to New York some years previously, then to Richmond, Virginia. It had been years since we'd played together. But he had plans to visit family in Massachusetts over the summer, so we got to talking, and decided... hey, what the hell, let's get the band back together. To mark the occasion, I resurrected "Recent Work", gave it a brand new cover design, and made 100 copies for Songs From Under the Floorboards, a sub-label of Intransitive Recordings. They sold fairly swiftly, so here it is again for the curious.

Stelzer's music is assembled out of cassette tapes, tape machines, and a stubborn refusal to admit defeat. He & his family live on a small farm in rural MA. At night, he hunches over piles of plastic, wires & little boxes and makes this stuff. No one knows why.

"I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares." - Saul Bass

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