Howard Stelzer

Howard Stelzer is a composer of electronic music, whose work is made primarily from sounds generated by cassette tapes and tape players. From 1997 until 2012, he ran the independent record label Intransitive Recordings. Early years Stelzer began making music using cassette tapes and metal percussion while he was a teenager in Boca Raton, Florida. After attempting unsuccessfully to learn how to play conventional instruments, he decided instead to use cassette tapes as the source of his music. Beginning in 1996, all of Stelzer’s music would be made with manipulated cassette tapes. I think tapes are simply the language that I speak. When I think about music ideas, I only and always think of them in terms of how they’d be articulated via cassette tapes. – 2016 interview with Tabs Out Podcast Stelzer explained how he first became “fascinated with (cassette tapes) as sound-producing objects: “When I was in high school (1989–1992) and banging on trash cans in my parents’ garage with a boom box recording in the corner, I discovered how the sound captured on the cassette was different from the acoustic sound in the room while I was making the music. From then on, I experimented with making