Saturday, August 17, 2002 Merzbow, Dying Mapa Tapes 1-2 Nyingma-pa is a school of Tibetan Buddhism. Over a rolling but unstable beat, all sorts of different noise scenarios pass by, proceeding like a Duchampian imaginary machine of some metallic elements mystically influencing another towards pointless action. "Indifferent, Part 1" offers beats again. I've never been an admirer of industrial music, but from what little I know (my freshman year roomate like Front 242 a lot) it shares certain sonic qualities, the harsh beats and guitar scum. It sounds like industrial but with less will-to-shock. No easy sex & decadence signfiers here. Masami Akita is beyond such obviousness, for better or worse. Then the beats get all erratic and disappear completely. I can't put my finger on it, butu I think he's done that before -- you know, introduce some nominal structure in the beginning and then pull the rug under from the listener by scuzzifying it and dispensing with it altogether. It's not a trick one can get away with too many times. Sounds like Masami Akita re-used a bit of the "Untitled Guitar Solo" from OM Electrique here. I've been suspecting he's been re-using tracks of earlier material but the quotes flit by too fast for me to really catch. When you have a huge back catalog like Masami Akita does, how do you know what to re-use? How can he remember everything? (Maybe he remembers OM Electrique especially well, since it was his first, after all.) Impressive. "Indifferent, Part 2" seems to be partly composed of sound-sources added and subtracted in lots of subtle ways -- you have to listen closely to hear the details amidst the muggy murk. It screams "craftsman." Then he completely throws everything out the window, leaving the listener with a manipulated live percussion work out -- pots and pans again -- for the last minute and a half. I decide for a change of pace to listen to the last two tracks in bed, not writing, and it's a significantly different experience. Lots and lots of thoughts pass through my head, almost none of which have any legs once I get back to the computer. This one does, sort of: in "Onion for Satva Karman," if I try to focus on any aspects of the soundscape that have little music-world reference -- anything that isn't the relentless beat, the chipmunk skabbling of radio voices, some drony feedback which is actually quite beautiful -- what's left has about as much solidity as smoke or clouds. Both smoke and clouds have features, highs and lows, peaks and shadows, but beyond that, it's frustratingly elusive to talk about their qualities with any care. "Onion" is a sea of scum; "Dharma Kamrage" is rather amazingly quiet, just a fast fuzzy beatloop, some drones, some noise add-ons -- and the sounds only get tinier. Charmingly, one of its trademark sounds is ice cubes (or maybe they're dentures) clinking in a glass. Records are played at odd speeds, and sputter off to silence. (link)

Friday, August 16, 2002 Merzbow, Mechanization Takes Command I'm guessing from the rock drums and the rock titles ("Iggy"!) this going to be a rock album and admirably so, not a quasi-ambient thing like the last time. "Electric Pygmy Decollage" could rock harder, though -- drums are a little underperformed. Spurts and howls of TV-derived dialouge -- soaps in English, it seems, possibly for that red-hot American demographic -- in between a fabulous toungue-wagging Taz impression. Masami Akita must love that daytime television. (Extensive use of daytime television implies MA 1982 has no job...but this is most likely an unwarrented assumption based on a misunderstanding of many levels of culture MA finds himself in.) Eventually "Mechanization Takes Command" takes command when the drums start pound-pound-pounding away. Or maybe they're guitars, you can never tell with Merzbow albums. Or a loop of one or both. Or neither! Parallel development with the "new wave" of eighties metal is suggested. Yes, this really does rock. Dense and fast give way to minimal and contemplative at unexpected moments. I don't understand its structure and dynamics; but I typically don't see the forest for the trees when it comes to the structure or dynamics of (non-pop) metal or (non-pop) prog so I'm relieved that I can tell myself nothing's wrong with me. I'm always relieved when MA adds drum programming to a track because I can always follow along no matter how aimless it gets. Tracks with beats go down easy and so far this album has gone down easier than any of the others. Guitars skid, doom Moogs swoop up and down, and if there was a recognizable chord change, it would be Jean Michel Jarre. If it was, he'd be using chords in the service of the tyranny making you feel some particular thing, whereas here is no aim towards something recognizably connected to an emotion, say, "doom" or apocalypse, none that I can make out anyway. If there is one, it's by accident. (There's the intentional fallacy, AGAIN.) This accidentalness is probably the main feeling Merzbow records evoke is "boredom" and I put it in scare quotes because that makes it sound like a bad thing -- to be non-perjorative (and more accurate), I mean this odd floating no-man's land of neitherness, neither happy nor sad, neither angry or satisfied, beyond nice and not-nice. Whn I'm trying to be critical in an off-the-cuff manner, my great sin is that I slip into this sneery mode, and I fear that I've done that a lot lately. In fact, I think I like this quite a bit; this is the Merzbow album I'd play for the unconvinced (rock division). "Iggy" does not take the Stooges' name in vain, nosiree. It's a quick bit of clanka-clanka-clanka. And there's that Ron Ashton-y bass guitar sound again in "Suicidal Machine." Robert Christgau on Loveless: "If you believe the true sound of life on planet earth has gotten worse than bombs bursting midair or runaway trains -- more in the direction of scalpel against bone, or the proverbial giant piece of chalk and accoutrements -- this CD transfigures the music of our sphere." This quote is useful. This wail of feedback and electronic treatment sound approaches the same cluster of frequencies you hear in small-scale destruction you might only see on TV: car crashes, construction equipment, artillery, public domain clips of atomic weaponry. Only it's much louder and intimate, because it's happening on your stereo, in your headphones, right in your earhole...so it implies destruction and/or death on a mass scale. Or, to be grandiose, bodies being torn apart. "Ai-Da-Ho": Bass guitars strut, electronics moan whoa-whoa-whoa, and if there was a recognizable chord change, it would be the Spacemen 3. I like that fact: MA can allude to rock modes of being without trapped by their structures. (link)

Wednesday, August 14, 2002 Merzbow, Material Action 2 (N.A.M.) Stryofoam with the quality of screams, or the cries of birds; raindrops of sounds, in drum-thud, in guitar twang; drones and pulse purrs. Guitar twangs are a connection to vernacular music traditions and hence a richly homey thing, at least to these ears. They undercut the apocalypse of everything else, which is not to say these sounds make everything nice and all, just less comprehensible when judged according to previous categories. It's hard to know what to make of it. Twenty minutes and only a small paragraph. I must be losing my edge. Twenty minutes after the beginning of "Nil Ad Miari" and I think Masami Akita must be losing his edge, with some dreamy gong sounds rising up from the murk, threatening to make the track "go ambient," but back come the infernal squeaks, layers upon layers of them, this time. I'd imagine he must attracted to the pain element in them: they cause pain listening to them, and they sound like things in pain. "Nimbus Alter Magneto Electrcity": maybe something about thunderstorms fucking up the equipment in planes or boats or maybe it's some X-Men reference I don't get. A dim thundery crunch with some phased jazzy brushed drums that only REALLY kicks ass when you hear some really electronic sounds rise from the murk and then it becomes....would it be too crass to say a rubber suit monster movie? Would it? I mean, really and truly, that's my only referent point for these echoey metallisms. Very echoey sounds come from spaces large enough to carry and sustain reverberations, so echoey sounds imply largeness, events in large arenas, things not scaled to a human level. But...to be rough, movie soundtracks underline cinematic action, and roughly follow the dynamic structure of the movie being soundtracked. Whereas this, this just floats around, little distinction between any given moment and any other. (link)

Tuesday, August 13, 2002 Merzbow, Nil Vagina Tape Loops Ewww, what a horrible GROSS title -- how am I gonna explain this to my mom? Well, mom, the above refers not to porn but an album of Japanese noise music which doesn't sound particularly porny to me, in spite of Merzbow's off-cited aesthetic connections to cultural acts involving naked women and what he calls the eroticism of noise. I do hear cartoon German Expressionist marching band music for dead children, however. These tracks have an amazing lack of "presence," like this album is a dub of a dub of a dub of a dub, Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room after its first few repetitions. It lacks the preceeding albums' commitment to density. Oh, and we're back to instrumental noodling. But underneath these conditions, drums and horns and guitar sound awfully similar. And no electronics...heh, spoke too soon. The second track (which is called "Nil Vagina Tape Loop No. 1" -- the first track was No. 0 and we all know one and zeros stand for, right?) stops dead and changes direction. No lo-fi loops. This is...uh...it's some "ethnic" bit of Fourth World cultural fusion, where the rhythms are Casio salsa, the horns are Harold Budd, and what sound like a bunch of chopped-up TV broadcasts that prove noise is the REAL universal language in our late capitalist global village THING. The marching band's back! Well, who can blame Masami Akita for using again, like a motif? It's good. The track is worth hearing for at least that. Maybe some enterprising young director might use it in a movie with lots of Bleak Post-Industrial Landscapes. Soon enough the vocal raspberry is back, too. I can't know for certain that any of the other elements (M.A.'s brand of soloing, as previously discussed) don't come from other albums I haven't heard or HAVE heard, for that matter. A couple of loops now from (what sound like) Japanese television broadcasts. My hunch is that even if I knew Japanese, they'd probably still be meaningless -- sometimes the voices have all the chirpy rhythms of American morning programs or Muppet news flashes. In loop form, those rhythms are heightened. Corollary: Masami Akita probably thinks they're as meaningless as I do. Television is always good source for irrtating banality. Observation: even if Masami Akita is using modern media in a critical fashion (and of course of course of course it's dangerous to assume intent), he sure does seem to consume a lot of it in the process. He isolates one loop which, again, I'm imagining it's a chopped-up soundtrack passage -- a detumescing musical passage and what could either be a flute or a high-pitched child's voice -- finding inadvertent rhythmic coincidences between it and another TV loop. It'd be fascinating if he let these loops go on longer and longer, forcing the listener to infer drama and narrative from slight shifts in loop volume, speed and frequency. It'd also be more conventional. For noise, this isn't very noisy. It's almost not enough to go on. These tracks feel like they'd be just one layer in another of his albums. Maybe that's the point of the title -- something's missing. (link)

Monday, August 12, 2002 Merzbow, Expanded Music 2 "Inspired by Stan Brakhage's scratched film." Ah, but which one? Brakhage made a lot of films where he'd literally scratch the negatives for effect. The only thing I've ever seen by him was Dog Star Man, which was so luminous it eventually put me right to sleep. I could tell -- or I read somewhere, can't remember -- that the film was immersed in the rhythms of the universe: solar, lunar, earthar, etc. I really don't like where this is headed. Well, anyway. Here the first seven minutes of this album feature pulse-like regularity gradually crumbles and then falls apart entirely. Which is to say it sets itself in opposition to the rhythms of life. To transcend it or destroy it? Fuck if I know. So far, so electronic. There's been lots of beeps and pulses and whines but I hadn't heard one bit of pluck pluck pluck or bonk bonk bonk or anything that sounds like "real" instruments. There are these "scratchy" electronic sounds all over it and maybe that's where the Brakhage comes in. How utterly literal. Still, hey, it's Brakhage and that's a wonderful thing to aspire to. A tape of a crowd, I think in a restaraunt, gets overwhelmed by amplification and feedback, then played at truly ridiculous speeds at irregular moments -- the crowd goes from one kind of noise to an entirely different. Should I read hostility in this? Well, drums were bound to return, but this time, this time they seem to have connection to the noise that enevloped them...as if the drums were channeled into two different tracks, one fucked up and fuzzed out, the other comparatively unmolested. I hear noise, but I also hear a harmony of sources. It doesn't seem aimless. In the murk of "Manipulation 8," I hear something like a music-source, something like an organ playing a tune because it alternates sounds and comparative silences in a way that haltingly resemble notes and chord sequences but it's so faint my ears can't reach it. The last track "M.F.S.W. 1" seems poised at a state of apotheosis -- it's a guitar of such apocalyptic heaviness that you can't see the forest for the trees, all you can hope to do is be overpowered by the sounds' details because the whole is just too enormous to comprehend as a whole. The details make no sense, either. It's just big, there's no point in making sense of it. I'm enjoying this, really, I am, I just really need to go to bed. I made the mistake of starting the review much too late. And I can't even begin to review unless I get in the mood for it, and that took a goodly amount of time to do. I have to pscyhe myself to listen to Merzbow by listening to Merzbow. Next time I'll start earlier in the day. I really enjoy it when I don't write and listen at the same time. (link)

Sunday, August 11, 2002 Merzbow, Solonoise Note to the high-strung: styrofoam is used on this album. Extreme Records calls this "the ugliest, cheapest sound in the world," and for the first few minutes -- dominated by a loud and dull sound of the kind you might hear on a crappy shortwave radio -- that's true. Yet the same vocal raspberry that first appeared in Remblandt Assemblage (perhaps it's meant to serve some ritual function, then?) introduces a lengthy section dominated by piano tinkles and violin -- all askew in Merzbowian fashion, of course, but still signifying a jazzy sort of clahss. It strikes me that this first time I remember hearing a piano on a Merzbow record, and on further thought, it doesn't surprise me that with its fixed, discrete tones even a prepared or detuned piano has much more limited capabilities for noise production than a violin, a voice, a guitar, a record player or an oscillator. For all the scum Masami Akita layers upon it, it still ends up sounding like free jazz. Free cocktail jazz. Part two has got this loooong acoustic guitar solo that's maybe a little more manic than usual, strings and fingers all over the place, but these untrained ears don't hear anything terribly new. Hasn't he doen this idiot-savant instrument noodle enough already? When you can still hear "real" instruments the actual scuzzy fuzzy noise here seems like window dressing; but when a shift comes and they're barely perceptable -- maybe just a bassline faintly droning on -- the feedback maelstrom rocks. It does! It stutters and repeats in an almost riff-like way. I wonder how long it took him to finally say "I'VE SAID ALL I CAN SAY WITH THESE GODFORSAKEN INSTRUMENT THINGS and now I just don't need them anymore." (Well, he probably never REALLY got rid of them, it just usually sounds that way.) In the third track, we get the typical noise lah-di-dah, then drums and percussion just STOP, and wa-hey it's another solo (and finally I realize this is why it's called Solonoise -- it's an album of solos. Jeez, it took me two thirds of the album to figure that one out.), this time for guitar. It goes from teeny little daggers of feedback to normal ol' guitar sounds and back again with truly amazing facility. Waa-YEEEEEEEEEEEE-OUCH. I'd better take the headphones off. He gets in a few good moments, esepcially when he plays off his voice, like when a guitar uses a mike as input (no, I have no idea how these things worked -- it just sounds like he's "playing" his voice on guitar) -- both guitar and voice go off in parallel drone power. But damnit, I think I'd like this better if he'd removed humaness out of the equation, or just filtered anything that evoked the movement of fingers and arms on musical instruments through layers and layers of electronics. (link)