seht & stelzer - Exactly what you lost
Intransitive CD, 2006 (INT028)
"This first album of cross-hemisphere hum by Seht (the nom de musique of one Stephen Clover) and Howard Stelzer emerged organically via tapes shared through the post between New Zealand and Boston over the course of a year or so. Without any spoken agenda or external organizing concept from the start, the music willed itself into a darkly psychedelic, implacably melancholy haze. A quick scramble of caffeinated tape action kicks things off, then the album rapidly dissipates into a thick, black sleep of environmental debris and humid fog. Worn loops were played into various outdoor acoustic environments (playgrounds, front porches, trees, other prosaic spots), then fed back into low-tech machines for further harmonic decay. Shapes form in the shadows and slip away as the edges blur. After a few attempts to heave itself up onto its feet, Exactly what you lost eventually huffs its last breath and dissolves in a cavern of industrial tics."
- Intransitive press-release
What they said...
"AQ fave Seht teams up with East Coast sound maker Howard Stelzer for an intercontinental drone drift long distance relationship, and the results are absolutely divine. Both are masters of crumbling decayed ambience and slow shifting organic drones, both of which are present and accounted for on Exactly what you lost. Field recordings, old tape loops, old tape recorders, all contribute to the gorgeously frayed soundscapes. Thick warm swells shimmer and slowly expand, the louder they get, the more they seem to crumble and dissipate, until the tones becomes staticky blasts of garbled sonic interference. Haunting faded melodies drift through dense clouds of abstract whir, all wreathed in a druggy haze, bits of tape manipulated into strange rhythms and textures, all leading up to the nearly half hour long final track, the darkest and heaviest on the record, a slow drift through a blissed out fuzz drenched universe, drifting in a slow orbit around both the Earth and the SUNNO))), floating on thick swells of downtuned thrum, a crumbling mass of glacial guitar, ominous, foreboding, but also strangely pretty, eventually emerging into a more serene soundworld of murky shimmer, oscillating overtones and strange footstep-like percussion.
Mysterious, and quite cool!."
"[...] With recordings taking place in [Stephen] Clover’s home base of Wellington and the studio of Intransitive Recording’s mastermind (and equally diversely disposed) Howard Stelzer, it certainly is a unique one in the sense that it defies all logic of working on a project together on two entirely different points of the globe. What one often encounters is that the results of such international meetings usually end up in tracks alternatingly dominated by one of the artists or in a conglomerate packed to the brim with layer upon layer and each artist trying to get in as much of his ideas as possible. Exactly what you lost is the very opposite of these two approaches, for it is seemlessly coherent in its fabric and minimalistically-pure to the bone in its arrangements. There is not a single note too many in any of these five pieces, neither in the shorter opening tracks, nor in the massive 26-minute finale, which relies on an abrasive bass drone and a single, ghostish melody which rears its head again and again in its defiant struggle against a certain demise, before surrendering to a vaporous solution and recordings of chirping birds and distant voices. It is almost as if these works were put on a diet, shedding kilo by kilo and pound by pound until they hit the point where the flesh meets the skeleton and “Supersize Me” seems like a bad joke from hell. It lends a very intense atmosphere to the music, which feeds from manifold influences: Very direct noise and tape manipulation-like squeaks and screetches, ethereal ambiances with microscopic crackling and subversive distortions, solemnly drifting vintage guitar drones and treated field recordings. Somehow, these compositions, some of them a mere two minutes long, are held together by an invisible glue, an unspoken understanding of where the record was supposed to go. Which is into no clearly charted territory, but into a world with many possibilities and scant words, a place which gets more concrete the less you ask for explanations. [...]"
- Tobais Fischer, Tokafi website
"Seht [...] teams up with Howard Stelzer, cassette manipulator, improviser and head honcho of Intransitive Recordings. Even when Stelzer loves to improvise, the material on Exactly what you lost was cooked up during the exchange of tapes through post. There isn't a clear plan or concept behind this, so it's a mutual love of sound. It's hard to say, but apparently there is a lot of processed field recordings, which are processed to the limit, that is: beyond the point of recognition. Long stretched drone material is created from this, interrupted by some of Stelzer's finer cassette manipulations. At times, certainly with the highly processed field recordings, I was reminded of some of the older Hafler Trio works, but throughout this is a little more raw than that, but at the same time also with great intensity. A more than great collaboration of highly composed (as opposed to improvised) music, with great menacing drone music, field recordings and manipulated cassettes."
"The two musicians were by exchanging cartridges between New Zealand and Boston and took about one year. Without original concept album grew up in the dark with psihodeliku melanholicnam fog. Hinges played in sports Doors and other acoustic atmospheres and recorded again - for the natural reverberation."
- FNORD! webzine
"New Zealander SEHT is STEPHEN CLOVER, one of the post-Corpus Hermeticum bands whose peers are Birchville Cat Motel, Peter Wright, A.M., folks like that. Clover and Boston artist HOWARD STELZER first swapped recordings from their respective locales--cars going by, planes overhead, birds in the bushes, just humdrum suburban stuff. Next, the recording of the NZ birds were played in Boston's trees and re-recorded the local birds singing along with the foreign tweets. Likewise, tapes of Boston cars going by were mixed with NZ cars going by. After it was all processed, scrambled and reassembled, it wound up having a certain melancholy feel. A cassette-blurp mess straightens out steadily until it's just a flat line and the tap tap tap of a dying tape deck motor. It's a party record, basically."
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