Saturday, August 10, 2002 Merzbow, Yantra Material Action "A YANTRA is a geometric design acting as a highly efficient tool for contemplation, concentration and meditation...The most celebrated YANTRA in India is the Sri YANTRA, the YANTRA of Tripura Sundari. It is a symbol of the entire cosmos that serves to remind the practitioner of the nondifference between subject and object." The title suggests Masami Akita this album was informed by the ritual practice of certain Yogic strands of religion, but as I'm not an adept of Japanoise OR eastern mysticism, I can't say how. Maybe it's something like the nondifference between subject and object appears in punk rock (which I've heard serious people talk about a few times), but I couldn't explain that, either. Drones do have a use in meditation and religious ritual, and they're all over the album, especially the first track (once again, they're all untitled -- maybe you could connect that to the nondifference of subject/object for homework) but so is a guitar riff which sounds EXACTLY the beginning of "Welcome to the Jungle" and what could THAT possibly tell us? (Connect Axl Rose's annihiliating narcissism to subject/object dissolution for extra credit.) Out of what I've seen, most writing about Merzbow stresses the uses of dada and bondage within his work but maintains a discreet silence on the purpose of all those mystical titles (what with his use of loops, it's a wonder why Masami Akita had to wait till 2001 to title an album Dharma). Maybe the extremes of mystical Hunduism and Buddhism make the more earnest partisans of Extreme Culture nervous: my nihilism can eat your nihilism for a light snack and spit out its bones whole. Glory be. Half of this album has already passed by. It's a shorter one than usual, about forty minutes. Good thing, too, because my pause coincides with what's easily my favorite track, #6. It's like snoring and balloons being violently groped; but pierce through that and you'll find rising and ebbing feedback eminence. I've got to listen to this with headphones. In doing so, I'm missing out on one of the social practices surrounding consumer noise, that of pissing neighbors off. Oh, it's not as if I've never wanted to piss people off with annoying loudness, it's just that...not these people, no. I don't even know them. Besides, I'm too fucking NICE and un-punk-rock. Eat my ass, non-distinction-between-BLAH BLAH BLAH. Listening to Merzbow on headphones make every sound seem more focused, and hence, more deliberate. Details becomes more interesting: hey, that little organ sound is like right out of Boards of Canada! Hey, he hasn't use much "found" sounds on this record...until now! Hey, he's using pots and pans AGAIN! And just when I was getting interested... (link)

Friday, August 09, 2002 Merzbow, Material Action for 2 Microphones The first track's title is "Hoochie Coochie Scratched," and that's a suitably off-center description of Akita's methods of production in this album: the use and abuse of vinyl, amplified cartridges, and radio broadcasts in the track's production...none of which makes Material Action much different from the other albums. OK, forgive my Salon-style rockcrit exposition and let's move on. It starts with a blues record -- played backwards, so you know the devil's built right in! It soon gets completely overpowered by the feedback, by the drones, and a soupy rumbling sound that's familiar to me from other, more contemporary Merzbow records. (It sounds kinda like when you a tape a CD at too-high recording levels and the music breaks up.) But it returns. Masami lets the record speak its peace every once in a while, then it's replaced by a French chantoozie, and then someone whose genre and sex escapes me. Um...opera, maybe. It's that distorted. And then many others, including quite a lot of cute Japanese pop records played at high speeds. One grand moment: amped booms cut back and forth with tumescent and detumescent strings, creating a brand new rhtythm.) Another great moment later on in the album: Masami stutters the speeds of a pop record so the notes the singer sustains (and the music accompanied with it) get warped in a frenzy of nauseous woah-uh-woah-uh-woah-uh-woah-uh-woahs that sound almost as if they were meant that way. I mean, they've almost got a pop drama to them. Does the music chosen have any particular purpose? These "found" sounds are the only obvious references to music-as-we-know-it here, should the weird eclecticism of his choices be significant to the listener? or are they eclectic to be disorienting and quasi-random? And is making fun of pop? You'd think so, but I can't read adverserial intent -- or much of any kind of intent -- in any of this. Perhaps I've been influenced by the fact that I haven't been able to positively identify a single piece of music, though there are times when I think I should. Since these music snippets are the most obvious referents to the world, they're the easiest thing to talk about. But they're just a detail. I'm always focusing on a particular detail in the music rather than how it sounds a whole thing, so I'm not sure how useful these descriptions are gonna be to you, the potential consumer of MerzMusic. I'm neglected the electronics, the drifting organ, radio broadcasts, pots and pans, crunchy guitars and the overamped record scratching that EXPLODES in the sound field. I haven't commented about how sometimes the events in the right channel will be in the foreground of my attention with the stuff on the left serving as background, and how sometimes the reverse is true, and how violently both channels shift their roles. It's not that words fail me, it's just that I'm not really bothering to use them this way. Not much I want to say about the last track, other than it's more obviously instrument-based than the other ones. This observation proves one thing about "New Acoustic Music No. 7": I've listened to it. Let me utterly ruin that last kiss-off and a highlight of "New Acoustic" is that Masami Akita breathes on that track. It's not belabored, no huffing and puffing, no Donna Summer sexual miasma. He doesn't even breathe into the mike that much. But it seems out of character for him, because these are sounds that are unmediated by electronics or instruments or what have you. I've heard the fruits of his work, but I haven't heard HIM. And yeah, I know describing the voice as the direct expression of one's soul is a phallogocentrist cliché...oh...God, nevermind! You just don't typically notice his voice, is all. Actually, it might have been Kiyoshi Mizutani breathing. Forget I said ANYTHING, then. (link)

Thursday, August 08, 2002 Merzbow, Paradoxa Paradoxa It starts up almost as a car would, with low rumbles. And the infernal machine kicks in again. No easy rhythms here, no short tracks JUST WHY IN GOD'S NAME CAN'T I JUST CALL THEM SONGS to divide experience, to pause the mind. This might sound misleading. Let's start again. It's noise...it's noisy...but not an assault. I can turn up the sound very high but it never seems as loud as it should be. It gets louder as time goes on but all sonic details are sketchy. A junkyard called off on account of rain. Cycles of mid-range shrieks -- something played at high but variable speeds -- punctuated by metallic pounds, all somewhere out of reach. Exhausted flutes and organ tones. It gets thicker and thicker. I try to think of a what a real-world equivalent of these sounds might be (funny, I rarely try such imagination exercises with "real" songs -- in songs guitars = guitars) and think, well, hurricane weather. I've lived on the east coast just about all my life so I've experienced full-on weather whose experience you could map onto this. It starts with way you notice in some stray moment a wind gust, then the storms feeds into your mind as it builds, builds, builds into extremities, into something sickening alien and new. Then you think it's backing down from a peak. Then you KNOW it's backing down. Then you forget. The shrieks ebb. Then but for the pounds, silence. Silvery violins. Tuneless violins. Some squiggly (Did I use that before? No, don't think so.) sounds, wanky guitar solos it sounds like, then before I could digest the changes it's bad as before. So that's the way it's gonna be, huh? Peak and ebb, peak and ebb with plenty of indeterminate parts in between? What a fucking trudge. What keeps me going is this faith that it's supposed to be fucking trudge and that out of it, like some Baudelarian boho gorging himself on experience, getting grimy in some bardo of aesthetic fatigue, then at the pit, the fucking pit, a height of mental clarity is reached. Good God, that track's over. OK, a big fat synth buzz. I could enjoy this. Other sounds, shrieks and hums and wavers, sustain just long enough before they get really and truly irritating. Just. This ain't no fun. No fun at all. But it's not...it's still not enough to make me want to stop. Something else, some other force (something other than mere inertia) makes me listen. These are alien sensations, a real indeterminate zone of aesthetic judgement where I feel nothing in particular and I feel it very forcefully. For some reason I think of the moments where I'm bored at work and I irritate myself by rescuing myself away from the contentment of deep sleep. I happen to feel sleepy right now. One last carpet of white noise (like the car-sounds at the beginning) and details start to hide away again. It drops out. Faint pianos all Monk-like, a chunky beat that's faint too. It almost all makes sense. For once -- for real -- a heady calm. I shuddder. The drones start rising in anticipation of the void. It takes a while before I can type again. (link)

Wednesday, August 07, 2002 Merzbow, Collection Era Vol. 3 I had to psyche myself up for this by taking an hour-long nap which only succeeded in tiring me. I vaugely remembered that compared to the last album and its near-pop beats, this one was gonna be something of an oozing slog. Plus, they're all unititled tracks and that just encourages confusion and writerly sloth. My memory seems to be only partly right. Untitled #2 references an actual music- in-the-world, namely dub, really and truly, or at least has a coiling rhythm with "wet" (ie "echoey") sounds that veers off into the random -- or maybe A HIGHER ORDER that a MERE MORTAL WITH A PUNY LITTLE MIND (like me) CANNOT UNDERSTAND. Untitled #3: Bugs. Bugs and birds. Animals, too. Romping over an electronik organick mulchy drone undergrowth. Lots of rapid, tiny little sounds... Wha...HEY! Just wait a cotton-picking minute here! Everything sounds all sped-up and shit! You think maybe this is just some track he didn't like much but played at twice the speed and fell in love with? And let me guess -- there's a track here, the last one, that's about twice as long and you just KNOW it must be the original track at the original speed! Right? Uh...rip-off, or not, or? This one still has the meagerest connection to rock-as-we-know-it: a steady bass, piano and violin. This one invokes "wormy" again (an electronic tone dies off into out-of-tuneness again and again with a barely-audible bit of fuzz in the back you could mistake for an angular riff) but I'm trying not to repeat my adjectives. Hell, I'm trying not to use any adjectives at all (but I used "angular" and I didn't want to but there's nothing I can do about it now) so it's a good thing the one after that passed too fast for me to write about. Most of the tracks neither exploding off into ever-densening white noise or maniacal rhythmic repeitions, they just keep to their wormy little selves: sneaking onto stage, do their business, and clean up after themselves before they leave. Very unspectacular. And then when I focus I find myself admiring this totally gross sound Masami Akita comes up and I feel and queasy and gross and THRILLED. The technique appears to be a tape of a wide range of sound-types, instruments, tones, volumes, timbres, run through at many different speeds, usually fast. Irregular tape manipulation = squeaky cartoon balloons. when I was a kid, I had a little record player with which me and my brothers would basically demolish records by turning them around with our index finger at various speeds or backwards, even. I wonder if this kiddie détournement is a near-universal childhood memory. I also wonder if this family of resultant sounds -- music or voice alternately turned high-pitched and squeaky then basso profundo and slow -- reads universally as fun or funny to people. (I've long suspected this is the secret appeal of Christian Marclay.) This has Goth smoovness! This is only three minutes long! And this last track...it's not Untitled #3 sped up. It's Untitled #5, with its electronic tone arching off into out-of-tuneness again and again, only slower. Well, at least that track starts off that way. Maybe all of the other tracks have its genesis from this big one. At first it sounds like it's composed entirely of other recorded sound sources, like records that aren't of Merzbow's own creation, then something else emerges, a slow, painfully slow guitar trawl distantly recorded like in an ill-lit boiler-room or something, that's the only way I can put it. And whee! It's over and is replaced by something else in the sound-soup! What dynamics? There are moments when I think this set of sounds -- just emerging and then just fading away -- could be the nifty climax of a noise record. Then I realize it is the climax of this noise record. (link)

Tuesday, August 06, 2002 Merzbow, Collection Era Vol. 2 Huh. First two tracks are almost conventional. Electric Miles comes to mind. Why, there's a moment in "Merz Rock 1" when the guitars burst up and the drums stop AT THE SAME TIME, indicating a thoughtfulness to the work not apparent in the last few recordings. Drums? Oh yes, there are drums. Drums doing pretty conventional things like rhythms. (Masami Akita isn't a bad drummer at all.) And then there are the electronics, scrabbling around the tracks with their own agenda like hooded gnomes. The "Merz Gamlan" tracks aren't rock at all. A rich, full-bodied soundscape, bubbles of sound rising, floating, fading. There's stuff in every nook and cranny of the limited sound-range of the original cassette recording. (Nothing ever registers in the high-end of my Winamp...uh...the sound display thing. The colored bars, I forget what they're supposed to be called.) A sound mass gelatinously moving around: like an ameoba, you can witness all the stuff in it (percussion, electronics, flute, guitar) moving around in it, yet the whole form galumphs in one general direction. Why are high-pitched squeaky sounds "funny"? Because they appeal to those hard-wired parts of our brain dedicated to paying attention to small animals and children? I have this recurrent image in my mind that Masami Akita is using pots and pans (including the disposable aluminum kind) for percussion -- that's what the "gamelans" sound like. In "Merz Gamelan 2," they do actually sound like gamelans, just not as resonant. They also don't seem to be capabale of a great range of pitch. The relentnessness of them hypnotize. I was entering some information about LOATD and my ealier blog, Cultural Artifacts of the Moment (don't look for it, it's dead, though I might put the archives up sometime) and I was struck at how VEHEMENT my earlier writing was. That's because I tend to write longer-scale, more well-thought-out things when I'm furious at something. Here I'm just blue-skying. Much like Tom Ewing's monument of rockcrit formalism "A Thousand Songs" (hey, Tom -- where's the link on the archive page?) I'm writing whatever comes to mind as I'm listening to these albums, maybe editing it later. Because I'm listening to noise records and noise records really don't lend themselves to the usual rock critic modes, the banality is built right in. "Merztronics Jazz Mix"...it's pretty. A ring modulator pulse floods the room ceiling, the jazz bass co-stars as the superego, the guitar forgets its medications. This description, self-conscious nonsense that it is, completely avoids any suggestion that this track might have, you know, DYNAMICS. Feh. I'll have to rethink my approach next time. Not for "Merztronics Rhythm Mix," though -- I'll just say you could dance to it if you were fucked up on cough syrup. It's possible I might listen to this again for pleasure. (link)

Monday, August 05, 2002 Merzbow, Collection Era Vol. 1 While the fidelity still presents a problem, there's a density here lacking in the earlier works. It's considerably "heavier" than the last three albums, by far. Oh, my cursed need to overlay a narrative on these albums! Hard to tell what exactly is creating all these mid-level sizzles, snaps and rumbles: guitar, electronics, some comtamination of the two, maybe? There are drums. At one point it's coherent enough to be very outthere jazz-rock. There are all these creepy tonal bends coming from the instruments, as if the music's melting IN YOUR VERY HEAD MELTING. The thought occurs to me that this might be psychedelic, but I'm not even sure what the phrase means when it comes out of my own mouth so I'm not ready to discuss it yet. I typically fall-back on a preliminary definition of "sonically colorful" when I bother to define it. How ill-suited and vague. I'm not a synesthete and this does not help matters. This is really noisy shit and yet it can lull. A slight little sound, a whisp of electronic whine, can shake me from a state of contemplation. I'm listening to this on headphones today, so an exalted state of concentration is pretty easy. Nothing else to distract me except writing THIS. And the air-conditioner. Unfortunately, making myself write while listening to this makes me prevents a different kind of pleasant concentration that marks some of my music-listening: I can't let my mind wander. Sometimes I'd be listening to a Merzbow record and find myself musing about science fiction emotions and imaginary genres. Describing these musings this way gives them too much credit: in fact, they may be deep but almost entirely content-free. "Untitled Material Action" passes by unviolently. More seems to be going on. There are bits of sounds here which are audible but you may not ever notice. This record's got foreground and background -- DEPTH! Tiny sounds (percussion and electronic chirps, maybe even flutes) abound in the "back," and electronic boings of various flavors in the "front." There's also more bathroom sounds. Like he's taking a bath, even soaping up. I think it's intended to be a very literal invasion of everyday sounds into the artwork -- a "material action" -- but I take showers instead of baths so what do I know? Masami then fucks around with the radio some for a few minutes afterwards. Some prog and some religious chanting -- sounds better than WFMU! And "Telecom Manipulation" is squeaky squiggles of squawk! I don't know how he does it. I don't know how these sounds are produced. They seem so mediated by electronics that they sound somewhat cut off from the human. One can deduce from pictures, liner notes, etc. that fingers, through string plucking and knob twiddling, must've produced these sounds, but unlike with (say) a guitar, it's difficult to imagine how sound A could have been produced by physical action B. He is a robot, he is what he plays. Just about engaging. I'll probably never listen to it again. (link)

Sunday, August 04, 2002 Merzbow, Remblandt Assemblage I've got to admire the opening loop. Polar disco. A loop of some kind, I think played backwards (it's got that phasing-sucking sound), muffled through four-track frippery, with howls of arctic winds. (OK, I'll stop with the adjectival frippery -- Barthes is gnawing on my leg here. It makes me bourgeois. But I AM bourgeois!) Masami affixes metal scraping objects over the arctic howl, but I'd rather be outside the igloo. It's violently interrupted by a burp. Or the longest, most violent raspberry you can imagine. The kind that would make your head turn beet-head and pass out. it's followed by another. And another. And feedback. Another question: how can you tell just by listening that somebody can play the guitar in a normal fashion but elects not to? It's because they follow a rhythm, and because they play chords, however "off" they sound. "Theme of Dadaist" follows a principled amateurism that goes further than punk (that is, it out-punks punk in one -- just one tiny one -- not-terribly-essential-to-punk way) because to all intensive purposes the noise made is indistiguishable from the really mindless fucking around of a thirteen-year-old. Except that it's not (the aforementioned rhythm and chords thing). conversation I've had several times in my life: "Punk sucked! They couldn't play their instruments!" "That's not always the case. And even in the cases where they couldn't, I bet that sometimes they'd still want to play that way even if they had the kind of talents you could admire." "But why would anyone want to play THAT way?" It's easier to explain with punk, because you could rely on the rhetorics of energy and authenticity that (some) punk shared with (quite a lot of) rock. Explaining Merzbow to my brother, on the other hand, would be like trying to explain Ad Reinhardt to my other brother. "I could do that." "Well, why don't you?" "But why would ANYONE want to?" "Do it and maybe you'll find out." Masami opens "Music Concret" with a toilet being flushed. This is a pop dada cliche (Oh no! The lowly toilet invades the nicey-nice artworld! Shit = gold! OH NO!) as damnable as fish in pop surrealism. There's a brief point in the beginning of "Prepared Guitar Solo 1" where Masami tunes into shortwave radio (or maybe it's regular old AM radio in Japan -- I don't know I've never been to Japan) so he can fixate on this one bright tone that seems to be heard through all the stations. AM radio is the early Masami's oscillator (the last CD in the Merzbox is called Annihiloscillator, one of the greatest album titles in all of rock music and Merzbow's got FUCKLOADS of others where that came from). Then he shuts off the radio, almost as an afterthought. As for the remainder, if you were to amplify your gullet while you were eating an acoustic guitar...you would have the greatest Fluxus piece EVAH. This is not the greatest Fluxus piece evah. Lots of funny-tuned acoustic fuckery. Not boring, this time. But not quite engaging. (link)

Merzbow, Metal Acoustic Music Two resevoirs of sound: a very distinct left channel and right channel breakdown unlike that murkfest of an album last time. One (the right) a groggily effervescent bit of phased noise, the other (the left, obviously) guitar scrape a go-go. Neither interact in any obvious way. I think. My first thoughtless thought is that Masami Akita recorded one track, then another track, then put them together to...well, I feel like I'm promiscuously throwing intentions around...aesthetic disorientation, maybe? Forcing the mind to hear music out of non-musical sound? Knowing what I know about cognitive pyschology (which is just enough to allow me to bullshit adequately), the mind has amazing capabilities to fill in the blanks of perception and create hidden harmonies and agreements where none "objectively" exist. Right now, in fact, if I pay attention hard enough, the...uh...pulses of sound on each track (I guess you call them that) rush by at about the same speed. Almost like they're coinciding. When two streams of music are played together, how do we know when one stream shows no signs of reference to the other? I suppose it's easier to tell in pop music than in, say, improvisational rock, because a pop songs' tightly bound infrastructure demands that every element within it lock together in a very precise way. No, wait...bootlegs complicate the matter. (As does multi-track recording.) Bootlegs can sure fool me. Had I never heard either constituent song, it'd take input from the outside world (you know, like media hype) for me to know 'A Stroke of Genius" was the combination of two entirely different songs together. First time I heard it, I was confused -- I didn't recall the Strokes having a girl singer. And I was wondering when the Christina Aguilera part was going to come on! It was only until the song got to the chorus of "Genie in a Bottle" did I realize exactly what was going on. Fifteen minutes in, I judge this is not boring, but not enagaging enough. I forsee no essential changes in this music occurring. At least, not enough changes to sway my interest. So when do I get to hear the good shit? (link)