Songs From Under the Floorboards is proud to present this gem from the archives of Ralf Wehowsky, aka RLW, founder of the Selektion label (a major inspiration for my starting Intransitive) and the legendary German band industrial/noise band P16.D4 (a major early and lasting influence on my own music).

Grauzeit features a previously unreleased session from October 1980 and two added studio improvisations that would appear in edited form on Wer Nicht Arbeiten Will Soll Auch Nicht Essen!, P16.D4′s debut cassette album. The band, which includes a young Achim Scepanski (later to found the Mille Plateaux and Force Inc techno labels) on synth, played a strange blend of gray noise, psychedelic improvisation, and industrial dub provocation that still sounds unhinged today. RLW and his colleagues (friends from school, and a temporarily-out-of-the-hospital mental patient who happened to be in the audience at an early concert) made a dada/jazz/punk racket in stark contrast to the fashionable new wave scenes in Berlin and Hamburg at the time. They would rapidly evolve into an art collective that would create installations, write and publish books, produce records and CDs, and instigate an international network of cassette-trading collaborators at a time when self-publishing on tape was itself a radical political act.

RLW "Eine Übung In Disziplin"

Howard Stelzer (b. 1974, New York) is a composer of electro-acoustic music. Almost all of his sounds are generated by, processed by, recorded onto and played back out of cassette tapes and consumer-grade tape players. He isn’t sure how most of these things work. Stelzer operated the Intransitive Recordings label from 1997 until 2012.