Chop Shop is one of the most quietly singular projects in American noise, and one of the least heard. Behind it is Scott Konzelmann, a sound artist who has worked under the name since 1987, and the idea at its centre is simple and physical: build the loudspeaker yourself, from scrap metal, old furnaces and salvaged parts, then drive sound through it so that what you hear is specific to that object. The drone belongs to the speaker that makes it. This is noise as sculpture, and Konzelmann has shown it as often in galleries, as installation, as on record.
The raw material is humble. Konzelmann recorded machine sounds and bands of immovable static onto cheap reel-to-reel decks, then broadcast them through his constructions, capturing the rattle and hum of a stressed speaker cone rather than trying to avoid it. Where another engineer would clean the hiss and the dropouts away, here they are the reward. The sound is rusted, resonant and coldly alive, closer to the noise of a failing machine than to music, and it sits next to harsh noise without being walled or aggressive in the usual sense; it is textural and slow.
The output is small and was made smaller by circumstance. There have never been many releases or many concerts, and at one point Konzelmann lost his sound tools in a flood. What exists is scattered across short runs and singular objects: the early cassette Scraps (1989), sold at Gen Ken Montgomery's Generator gallery in New York where the pieces were shown as installations; the Steel Plate double ten-inch strapped to a literal sheet of metal; a three-inch CD on the Dutch label V2_Archief with a soft lead cover; another release wrapped in cracked safety glass. The packaging is part of the work, the visible source of a physical sound. The 2008 CD Oxide, built from water-damaged reels of his early recordings, is the rare release that found notice beyond the noise underground.
For this archive Chop Shop sits in good company. The records came through RRRecords and its Pure series, Ron Lessard's long-running noise operation, and in 1995 Konzelmann made Red & Buried as Chop Shop plays Emil Beaulieau, a reading of Lessard's own noise alias. The project is a reminder that the American noise underground was never only about volume and confrontation; some of it was about objects, decay, and the sound a broken thing makes when you listen closely.