PBK & Howard Stelze — She Thinks She The State Department

She Thinks She The State Department is a wonderful, unbalancing, and disconcerting collaboration between Chicago’s PBK, and Massachusetts prime cassette tape-scaper Howard Stelzer. It’s a five-track CD album, which blends disorienting textural fumblings, stuck avant-jazz bayings, off-kilter droning’s, and a general feeling of disqueting-to-unhinged sound-scaping.

We open with the album's longest running track, the wonderfully titled “You Could Be Lying(I’m A Terrible Lair)”. This just under sixteen and a half minute track is adetailed/ at times densely dizzying blend of consistent shoe-like knockings, spinning mechanical tones, uneasy honks, subtle junk metal shifts, and strangely forking/ animistic drone undercurrents. It’s a daring-throwing the listener straight in with an oddness opener- but it works well, subtly developing along its length.

Moving into the rest of the album, we find the stuck/ manic sax warble, slowly baying horn rolls, and squiggling-to-back & forth texturing of “A Legacy, At Least”. There’s the ringing drone displacement, reverberation tone unease, and shapeless sax freakout of “Drop Anchor Somewhere!”.

With the album playing out with another wonderful titled track, “Top Management Has Vowed to Stop What It Is Doing - Not Now, But Soon”. It blends constantly oscillating machinery purrs, uneven drags, baying drone clouds, and a general feel of building/ if slight odd sound detail.

Both parties here are seasoned and highly accomplished sound makers, and together with She Thinks She The State Department, they make a wholly engaging & rewarding unbalancing collaboration.