Chop Shop is the moniker of New York based sound artist Scott Konzelmann, whose activities have comprised recordings and installations featuring his speaker construction assemblages and sonic compositions since 1987. There have been several micro-edition CD-R releases, 2 noted 3″CDs for the V2 label, many old school cassettes, a handful of singles, and two 10″ vinyl productions. One of which was a double 10″ bound in roofing tar strapped to a plate of steel. The other was a split 10″ with Small Cruel Party, which was literally chopped in half and assembled on the listener’s turntable at their needle’s peril.
Konzelmann’s sound and noise are intrinsically connected to his sculptural objects. Forged from repurposed junkyard fragments fitted with functional loudspeakers, these objects compress and articulate particular frequencies into hissing static, jet-engine drones, and noxious rumbles, all of which retain a metallurgist residue.
For this rare live presentation Konzelmann will be offering up a distillation mix from his highly acclaimed 2008 release Oxide (23_5 org. US) utilizing prepared analog reel to reel tapes of his muscular and aggressive drones in a dialog with a solitary speaker construction.
Leif Elggren is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm. Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer and composer, he has many albums to his credits, solo and with the Sons of God, on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition. His music, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and can range from mesmerizingly quiet electronics to harsh noise. His wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside-down, hidden actions and events taking on the quality of icons.
Together with artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, he is a founder of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) where he enjoys the title of King.
Elggren spent five years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, specializing in drawing, design and book printing. In the late ‘70s he began to associate with performance groups, meeting people like Hausswolff and Thomas Liljenberg. With the latter he formed Firework in 1978, a duo that put up exhibitions and performances. Around the same time he purchased a press and started to publish art books.
In 1988 he formed the duo Guds Söner (The Sons of God) with Kent Tankred, whom he had met four years earlier. The duo excels in creating long, puzzling stage performances that give equal roles to physical action (or inaction) and soundtrack (live or taped) with themes such as violence, love, the quotidian, food and royalty.
Elggren released his first 7″ records in 1982 and 1984 on Hausswolff’s label Radium. A first solo LP, Flown Over by an Old King, came out in 1988. The inception of Firework Edition Records in 1996 allowed Elggren to release more of his music and the growing popularity of installation art in avant-garde music circles (thanks to its ties with experimental electronica) has given his work more international exposure since the late ‘90s. Other key solo works include Talking to a Dead Queen (1996) and Pluralis Majestatis (2000).
Together with Hausswolff, Elggren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 (with Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen from Finland and Anders Tomren from Norway).
In 2007 he appeared (with John Duncan) at the Netmage festival in Bologna organized by Xing and executed “Something Like Seeing in the Dark.”