We know Modelbau. And we know Howard Stelzer. And we know they know each other. But did you know they do stuff together? Well, they do. Not often, but, well, sometimes. For a project a few years ago, Frans created sounds for Howard for one of his projects, and several sounds remained unused from those sessions. So after a somewhat prolonged stay on the hard drive when Frans heard of the call for artists by Inner Demons’ Dan Fox, he thought it would be the perfect moment to revisit this unused material.
As we know, in the meantime, Inner Demon is a small label with small releases (mostly 3″ CD-r) in small editions (42 each). Because, yes, they are the ultimate answer to any question. Next to that, the label has a solid political view for which I happily point you to their website. So when Frans heard of the call for artists, he put 1 and one together. Where Merzbow released SCUM (Scissors for Cutting Up Merzbow), Frans found the title ‘SCUM’ fitting for a release with the subtitle Stelzer being Cut Up by Modelbau. The perfect match!
People who have heard more music by Modelbau will be surprised because this release shows a side of Modelbau you might have never heard before. This is noisy as hell. It might well be the noisiest you’ve ever heard from him. Meticulously cut, pasted, melted, faded, compressed, manipulated and mastered into a 20+ minutes exercise of getting out all of the emotions. It’s probably not the message of this release, but it’s as if someone’s hate towards inequality from a whole lifetime has been channelled into these 20 minutes. It’s beautiful, it’s honest, it’s in your face, it’s loud, and yet … It STILL has dynamics, a build-up and variation … I definitely wouldn’t mind hearing more of this side of Modelbau. It might well slide into my personal ‘most-appreciated-output-by-modelbau’ list.
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