Saturday, August 24, 2002 Merzbow, Pornoise Extra I'm not in the mood but I'm never in the mood so it's just as well. The central sound of "Flesh Radio 1," the one that frames its noisebursts, sounds like the main color television my family had in our living room back in the seventies -- a warm hum produced as it warmed up, but here flickering in a way almost tune-like. What would Masami Akita say about that? I think he's counting on the idea that nobody could possibly feel nostalgia for electronic sounds. It would be a sentiment too loaded with the kinds of emotional responses he's trying to redirect his listeners away from. Ugh, how terribly manipulative. I'm gonna feel nostalgia whether HE likes it or not! I have to face facts and admit that "Dance of Dharma-Kala" is putting to sleep just when I IHINK I sould be enjoying it. What's it sound like? Oh, it's got a lot of loops -- that's all you need to know, right? So...did Masami Akita forsee people nodding off to his works? Do you think it surprises him, since he eschews traditional music structure and uses lots and lots of repetitions? Well, music traditionally utilizes repetitions anyway. You know, choruses and what not. But pop songs, even something like Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are" where the title is repeated something like thirty bazillion times, don't use quite THAT much repetition, and even when they do, they mix it up for color and variety. Bob Dylan says the first line in the chorus of "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" many times, but very differently each time: "Oh! Mammma!" "Ohmmamma!" "ohMAAAma" and so on. (Looking for the lyrics of "Just the Way You Are" causes me to access one of those websites where people place irritating MIDI files on every page so I'm treated to an accidental Billy Joel vs. Merzbow bootleg.) The shortest song in the Merzbox: "Psychotic Orange" at 0:42. I pick this review up again over twelve hours later, being unable to continue on account of sleepiness. So, "Helga's Death Disco," then. When Masami Akita plays with a chintzy electrobeat, I can pretty much tolerate any repetition or horrible noise he ladles on it. When he also adds a soundbite of a woman screaming in agony -- maybe an actress, maybe porn superstar, whatever, doesn't matter -- nope, I can't follow him, no way. Eros Pandra is fantastic, keyed to loops of fanfare of triumphant synth squeals and machine gun fire, and the low level hum of "Psychotic Orange" in the background. Yeah, it sounds like sex. Infernal sex where every up down in out burns your nerves again and again and again, climaxing with explosions of noise obliterating what little structure the loops provided. Is Merzbow...metal? well, there are these metal boing-boing-boing sounds in "Kirie," but it's all too ambient to be true metal, I s'pose. Things drift too much. Plus Merzbow just doesn't seem like a really malevolent cat. Merzmusic doesn't present itself as the direct expression of Masami Akita's thoughts and feelings. There is no room for "I hate you" or "I hate this" or even "I exist." So what I'm trying to say very sloppily is that there's a self-negating disconnect between the noise and the noisemaker (and yeah, I'm sloppily using music and noise interchangibly here) that metal, with its ideas of power and agency, couldn't tolerate. Dagnabit, Masami Akita just doesn't do ENOUGH with his loops to make me happy. He might arrive at a really great "sound," like with dings a electronic piano noodles or the auto vrroooom in "Domine" (cars = machinery = sex) but it just goes on and on and on, impossible to concentrate on and impossible to ignore. (link)

Friday, August 23, 2002 Merzbow, Pornoise/1kg Vol. 3 "UFO vs. The British Army" 0:00 A new loop, another sinister white American distorted as if from an army two-way radio: "Men at this time will be [ ]." You can hear birds in the background. 1:00 Same loop, slight rumble of muzz. 2:00 Loop grows a little echo alongside the muzz, which seeps around with vengeance. 3:00 The muzz continues. Sounds a little like rain, like wind. 4:00 Another loop steps in, like clockwork, providing a kind of faint bass-like sound. 5:00 Like a dance music track or something. 6:00 Yeah, it's a bass loop of some kind, underlining the accidental rhythmic qualities of the guy's voice. 7:00 The bass gets louder still, but never actually sounds, you know, dancey or anything. 8:00 The muzz drops out a bit. Another odd loop with no relation to the other ones. The loops drop in and out, sometimes louder and clear, sometimes silent. 9:00 Back to a temporary stability. It seems to be getting louder and louder. 10:00 One of the bass loops getting louder, crunchier, more emphatic. 11:00 The bass loop sound like it's starting to obliterate everything else. With all these loops going on, it's got this slowly polyrhythmic thing going on/ 12:00 A new randomness enters -- a detuned Moog synth, distorted, low swooping around. 13:00 Synth starts swooping up more mid-fi. And now...chirping sheets of white noise. 14:00 The original voice loop is still there, the original polyrhythmic loops are only faintly heard with all the new Moog muzz. 15:00 More synth twitters! Pweeeeeeeeeeyoooooooo! 16:00 Stasis seems to be reached again. Oh wait...more screeches, just in time. 17:00 A chorus of wormy screeching feedback. The original voice loop is still there. 18:00 Another relative lull, and another faint outburst to fuck up the loop's regularity. 19:00 Can't hear the voice loop or the original bass loops at all. Now it's a faint layer of idiot-avant drumming, screaming, feedbacking. 20:00 The voice is back, a little. But there's no musical regularity apart from that now. 21:00 Well, the non-dancy beat is finally back. Bird-like tweets shoot back and forth from the left to right speaker. A growing mid-fi guitar screeeeeeeech. 22:00 And a low voooom. Back to stasis. 23:00 Now it sounds completely different again. Now it sounds the same as it was in the first place. 24:00 It's beginning to feel like Masami Akita's run out of ways he can vary this piece. Some layer of noise dropped out. 25:00 Fainter and fainter. More layers go. All we have is slight muzz, mechanical birds sounds, like a record being sped up. 26:00 Bursts of muzz...then everrrrryyyyythiiiiing slooooooowsssss.... 27:00 An unidentified voice loop, maybe the same one as before, very dronily slow. And then that stops, leaving comparative silence. Then the original bass loops peek through again. 28:00 It revs up again, in its original quasi-rock-like way, with the original voice loop. And falls away. 29:00 Huh. It gives way to the original "death rhumba" loop from the last album. Yet another bow of the quasi-rock muzz. Bird chitters. 30:00 Quasi rock + sounds + original voice loop + chirps. 30:46 Romeo done. "Toy 69" Donna Summer, dragged through the mud. (link)

Wednesday, August 21, 2002 Merzbow, Pornoise/1kg Vol. 2 "New Kharma" is an endurance test. Thirteen minutes of 1) A deep dull trawl of a beat -- a death rhumba 2) dentist's drill through Ron Asheton's amp 3) percolating mud. 1) never seems to change except for volume, and minimally at that. 2) seems to fall into loop form at some point, and 3) falls into loopform at some point, or may have always been one. The changes are minimal, so in order to pay attention I have to focus on really minute shifts, shifts I'm not even sure are there -- and hope for a really big shift, one that I can't entirely be sure will come. Then...hooray! Liberation. A different loop! Which really only introduces a marked variation of the previous loop arrangement. Then a series of new arrangements that prove to be much less marked variations, all seemingly design to make me anticipate a real shift. It produces the kind of grating repetitious monotony that makes the repetitions that keep me alive (like breathing) feel like a monotonous pain in the ass. I counted the minutes for it to end. "Dynamite Don Don, Part 1" is another kind of test. Even for Merzbow, methodwise this is fairly extreme. The beginning comes close -- close -- to being pure undifferentiated white noise, save for a repeated metallic "whee-whee" sound about every eight seconds or so. If you wait long enough, elements start to emerge from the haze: lower sounds and higher sounds, buzzes, clinks, thumps, shouts, sqweeeeee-wee-wee-wees. Again, it's a matter of creating high degree of uniformity so that the ear is force to focus on the minutely un-uniform. Hell, by the end, the appearance of auto sounds (panning violently between speakers) starts to seem exciting. So what's he gonna do know? God, it's that whee-whee sound again. Like Part 1, "Dynamite Don Don, Part 1" only starts to get interesting at the very very end. Lots of times during my mad parade of Merzbow-listening, I hear what sounds like Masami Akita breaking shit somewhere not in a studio or at home -- you know, outside, or in an abandoned weedy warehouse somewhere taking a baseball bat to a metal drum or smashing bottles or whatever. The thing is, this does violence to my (rather simple-minded) idea that Tokyo, being the ultra-dense city that it is, cannot allow for the large expanses of empty space necessary for MA to accomplish this. John Cage: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." This is not universally true. (link)

Tuesday, August 20, 2002 Merzbow, Pornoise/1kg Vol. 1 Except for the last one, (which is over a half-hour in length), tracks range from three to seven minutes, practically pop for Masami Akita. Tracks often feature loops of sounds -- screams, porn, sinister white American -- whose "trangressive" nature was already well-established to the point of Cliché back in '84, when this was released. The same could be said for titles like "Industrial," "Obituary 1" and "Loop Fuck 1." I don't know whether to applaud Masami Akita's obviousness on this album as a pop move or label it pandering to a thrill-seeking microaudience. It's still Merzbow, though, so you can still ignore that and admire the drony buzzes (like an old color television set warming up) which rise up fume-like around the garbage-pail scrapings, playing off them, metastasizing them, framing them. So much is happening. At any given moment, you could say, "well, this and this and this just happened, and all that stuff wasn't occurring a minute ago, at least not in this way." Yet the pace overall is slug-like, or slower. There's quite a lot of animated surface detail. This describes how quite a lot of Merzmusic sounds. The sinister white American: "Ya got kids over there on the slide, then when ya wanem..." "Ya got kids over there on the slide, then when ya wanem..." "Ya got kids over there on the slide, then when ya wanem..." "Ya got kids over there on the slide, then when ya wanna..." A mild buzz slides up behind, then retreats. A new loop: "Not. Knowing. What...(get down)" which also sounds like "Night Noise White," which is the title. Loop of inhaling/exhaling noise. Garbage cans in an enormous washing machine. The "not knowing what" loop returns, as does the "slide" one, softer. Nope, can't do it. Can't do real-time describing of this thing. It changes too fast. Uh...make that garbage cans in an enormous washing machine underwater. Lots of echo. The dialogue loops pop disappear and reappear at unpredictable moments. About midway they're played at a fraction of the original speed so they become nothing but a metallic croak. Occasionally it's anchored by a live recording of what sounds like MA tearing shit up live: sometimes a clearing in the noise develops and you can hear him tiredly strike bottles and wood, and audibly catch his breath at a certain point. Then with eleven minutes left, a shift, like something new was discovered right then and there. A TwahTwahTwahTwahTwahTwahTwahTwahTwah that drifts into other repeating sound shapes. It's not a loop. It's generated but means I dont know how. It functions it feels it moves like more contemporary electronic MA noise. After a while, I notice the dialogue loops disappeared a while back and haven't returned, at least not in the conditions they were in. (Maybe that audience-pandering was a red herring.) I don't hear anything with an obvious real-world non-acoustic source. Maybe he's done this before, but I haven't really noticed until now. No more loops, as far as I can tell. Freed from structure, everything sounds enormous. (What's the sound of a composer arriving at a realization?) The loops -- the metal-sounding ones -- return at the end. Initially I feared the "slide" loop might have some reference to ch*ld m*l*st*t**n (yeah, some I don't some weirdoes googling this page for all the wrong reasons.) but now it seems like a random bit of police scanner dialogue. Menacing enough, but acceptably menacing. (link)

Monday, August 19, 2002 Merzbow, Agni Hotra The title track is an attractive collection of loops featuring lots of acoustically-recorded crunchy destruction, real-world jackhammers and metal on metal, all of which are infiltrated by what may or not be loops of unnatural white noise, and then drones-screeches-squelches that most certainly not loops. It's rare that a Merzbow is so easy to understand structurally (unless there's a higher structure I'm just not getting, etc...God, how many times do I have to admit to my intellectual limits here?) Then there's a Hitler loop. Funny how I can't understand German at all, but I know that voice, with its hysterically pompous cadences. Growing up, once I become aware that there was a world before I existed, Hitler was there, in the documentary evidence the mass media would throw in my face every once in a while, newsreels and movies, etc. By chance, there were a number of documentaries on the Holocaust this weekend, and that's sensitized me further to the presence of that man. His presence here is very almost disgusting; what makes it almost and not completely is the fact that I have no clue what purpose the loop serves, or what it might serve. For all I know it could be a sound-picture of Hitler in some kind of Vedic hell, but since I know that as with the surrealists, his work often relies on a creative use of automatism, I can't be sure Masami Akita intends anything so conceptually tidy. Or intends anything at all. Regardless, I still think Hitler's something you just don't plop in the middle of a track, divorced from history and context. You couldn't divorce the sounds of Hitler ranting from history even if you tried. The feelings people have about him just run too damned deep. The main irony is that Hitler wanted to ensure the complete annihilation of the dada and surrealist artists Masami Akita pays homage to so graciously, right down to the nom-de-plume of Merzbow (and, now that I think of it, the dada crowd would've probably loved Merzbow...though, to put things in perspective, they'd probably also love...oooh...I dunno. Chuck Berry? The Sonics? John Spencer?! Sure, they wouldn't know any better.), and here's Hitler in the works, unannounced and uncontextualized. "Asagaya In Rain" is...well, something in rain, maybe Asagaya, maybe not, I wouldn't know. It's recording of some landscape in the rain, with sections unnervingly looped and echoed, but not so much that the rainy sound and feel are lost entirely. By "Loops in Flames" it's pretty clear this is shaping up to be an album dominated by loopage, and good for Masami Akita. And damnit, here is Hitler AGAIN in "Albertus Magnus," which would otherwise be fantastically gothy in feel, snakes and chains rattling. Dan Perry would love it, if it weren't for...you know. Bells and gongs hint these tracks, like those on Yantra Material Action, might have been created with the prescripts of religious ritual in mind. And then he coughs! Right at 1:50 of "Untitled Waves," in the middle of a bright drone, you can hear a faint cough. At 3:13, you hear another one. Huh. (link)

Sunday, August 18, 2002 Merzbow, Dying Mapa Tapes 2-3 Back to the Mapa. When I'm in a state of contentment, I'm impressed how aimless these albums have been. These tracks are like rooms without walls, and rooms without walls are in fact forests. Since this is "noise music," and I know of its expectations, its genre restrictions, etc., I have this sort of hesitancy to talk about "feeling" when talking about Merzmusic. Whether or not it's appropriate to assign "feeling" to these tracks, they do have "feel" or "flavors" (Maybe that's the reasoning behind the foodie titles of the new A Taste of Merzbow..., something which has been puzzling me for months now.) or "tints" (the same with the Tint EP from a year or two back). I think I have to watch my use of qualia here -- it's all dangerously metaphorical. I don't know, maybe what experience as "feel" and "flavor" and "tint" in the music are actually feelings, it's just that there's some culture-bred resistance to calling them as such. So, the album, then? Really lo-fi, again. Oh! Oh! Holy crap! This is the first time I can positively identify a piece of "found music" Masami Akita uses. It's George Benson's "On Broadway!" (Lou Reed, quoted by Lester Bangs: "This guy George Benson, years ago, he was a bass player, invented the Benson amplifier, absolutely no distortion, totally clean, totally pure sound." This is said just before Lou promises Lester a sneak preview of Metal Machine Music...only to play a Ron Wood album. The irony is...well, do I have to spell it out? Guess not.) I'm on the verge of identifying another -- it's some kind of disco track with really odd, nearly atonal bass parts. I can't hear it because it's drowned out by piano playing that's all randomy (of course)...the general gist is a playing a piano with the radio on, voices in the other room. And like a Fassbinder film, it stops cold. Only the track's not over. Something completely different comes on: beat + guitar. I can't say it enough: you can't do that too many times without it becoming a gimmick. Luckily Masami Akita doesn't seem to repeat many of overarching ideas concerning noise-structure, including how tracks should begin and end. Christ almighty this is lo-fi. It's got feedback and bleeps and white noise and yet it sounds like home recordings in Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Who was it that said old blues records from the twenties and thirties sound more ancient today than digitally recorded Gregorian Chant? WHY? WHY? The very idea is bizarre. I think it means: when assigning a mental date to a sound recording (or a color photograph, or a black & white film) the peculiarities of the recording technology are carry much more weight than any issue of style in what's being recorded. Styles are reclaimable; the culture is flooded with the past ransacked. So flooded in fact that examples are unneccesary. But while the stylistic markers of "the fifties" and "the sixties" and "the seventies" (the terms given scare quotes due to my hopeless, senseless disgust at such easy caricature, in spite of the fact I indulge in such thinking all the time -- I almost got a professional pompadour this weekend, for chrissakes), pompadours and tracksuits and cowboy shirts disappear and reappear, ebb and flow, things like vacuum tubes and Kodachrome with hyped reds do not...or at least, not quite as readily. Styles are permanent. Styles don't really go away, even when we think they do. At the hands of Sebadoh or Guided By Voices, lo-fi is tinged with nostalgia -- but what flavor of nostalgia is Masami Akita playing with here? (Unless the lo-fi sound is pure accident..and I'm willing to believe that, if given good reason to.) Robert Christgau on Robert Ashley: "A friend who's done yoga to this record -- not an arty type, incidentally -- is reminded of going to sleep as a child with adults talking in the next room." The last track (it's a got a looooong title I'm not gonna bother to type out), with its radio and Tv samples, reminds me of going to sleep as a child with adults talking in the next room, washing up after dinner, with the TV on. Then fifteen minutes into it, another Casio beat comes on and totally obliterates that feel. (link)