Kind of underrated in the annals of U.S. harsh noise but one of the key purveyors n' pioneers of primal, sense-obliterating sonic overdrive, noise / multi-media artist Scott Konzelmann has been at this since 1987. His strategy has always been fascinating, often recording noisescapes onto reel-to-reel and then blasting them through ad hoc speaker systems he created himself out of scavenged electronics and metal. The resulting speaker-abuse is thus a feature, and not a bug. This saw him working in the area of larger art installations, but even his recorded releases pack serious skuzz.

A brutalizing entry in RRRecords’ Recycled tape series, Chop Shop's contribution is a minor classic of crushing 1990s-era American harsh noise. Depending on the copy you end up with (some tapes appear to feature the one track split across two sides, others seem to repeat the material on the b-side), each side presents an untitled twenty-four minute series of destructive loops, salvaged metal, humid low-fi drone fields, mechanical crunch and throb, building a rhythmic scaffolding that supports the ongoing shifts in tone and texture and aggression as the recording plays out. It's one of the more mesmeric Chop Shop recordings from this period, focusing on blocks of semi-wrecked sound, decomposing timbres, structured loops. Building, stacking and developing, with little breathing room between the shifting structures. It's a more raw and lo-fi approach as far as the fidelity goes, but that corroded rawness to Chop Shop's recordings are a huge part of the appeal to me; in some ways, you can draw parallels between this and some of the more layered "junk noise" artists like K2 and Haters, but Konzelmann pursues a different type of logic with the creation of each of these pieces.

A symphony of squeals and white-noise squalls, creaking metallic gears and pulsating static, controlled blasts of pure overdriven distorted crunch and almost subliminal rhythmic elements; like much of his longer-form work, there is an order and coherence to this noise that even slips oh-so-briefly into a mechanical quasi-technoid throb before being wholly swallowed up again in a blast furnace of in-the-red roaring distorted fuzz and crunch.

Compared to the often elaborate sculpture-items that housed his recordings in past releases (which included CD bolted within steel plates and tapes entombed in clumps of industrial tape) this entry in the Recycled Music Series is relatively conventional in physical presentation, despite the noise being dubbed onto random commercial cassettes per the RRRecords series aesthetic.