Friday, August 30, 2002 Merzbow, Vratya Southwards I won't tell you what "Vratya" means because I don't know, and I'm not going to bother looking it up. First track is "Electroacoustic Voyage," and I won't tell you what "electroacoustic" means, because I also don't know that, either -- this is mildly pathetic because I've heard the term bandied about in general conversation since I first saw Lester Bangs name-check Xenakis in his "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise" and that was when I was...gosh...seventeen. I don't even want to think about it. Oh, but it's SO MUCH better to think about Masami Akita's electronic cockroaches...excuse me, his electroacoustic cockroaches...than it is to think about growing old growing old wearing the bottoms of my trousers rolled, etc. Just as I was going to applaud the track for sounding reasonably sensational (main sonic attraction: gongs. Again.) it switches off and we get a great big beast making yummy sounds, snoring, waking up and sucking on a lemon yellow balloon. This ALWAYS happens; whenever I find something I really like in a Merzbow track it has the fucking nerve to morph into something else before I can pin it down, wriggling, in words. Jesus, it sounds like he's gargling phlegm. This track just about died. Steam rising and falling in a radiator. OK, I give up. Britannica says a vratya is a "wandering ascetic, member of either an ethnic group or a sect, located principally in the Magadha (South Bihar) region of ancient India. The vratyas lived outside the fold of the dominant Aryan society and practiced their own forms of austerity and esoteric rites." And the track got interesting before I started paying attention. Hoover sounds, you know. "Electric Red Desert," better than all those nasty acoustic green rainforests. Or an homage to Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso. Which I've never seen. Seems to me Masami Akita, at this stage of his recording career (God, what he does seems so organic that it seems idiotic to think of him having a career. Listening to these recordings, it still feels like he's some sort of hobbyist -- albeit a superduper serious hobbyist -- making recordings when he gets the time.) is really in love with a) echo and b) metallic sounds. Possibly possibly possibly because sound with echoes and sound from highly resonant objects imply not merely things making sound but things making sound in space, spaces in the world. And if MA's project is something like Cage's or Duchamp's, where the artist attempts a collapse between art and the world, well, those sounds would be highly useful towards that end. Right? He even ends "Electric Red Desert" with live sounds from what sound like a carnival. DO YOU SEE, etc. Only two minutes into "Lighting" -- a special bonus track -- and I like it already. It's a lot like Edgar Varèse's Poem Électronique in the way...in its dynamics. I don't know quite what I mean. It's really good, but I suspect what I deem good in it is how there's little, if any, of the studio multitrack massing of sound, where there's sound in the foreground and other sounds in the background, and you could focus on any detail if you so wished. Instead, sound events, each coming from a single sound source, follow sequentially, or close to it. (First then there's this, then there's this, and then this, instead here's a bunch of things, then another bunch of things, etc.) It's simpler to comprehend is what I'm saying. Each sound event is like a word or a gesture in a larger whole. (link)

Wednesday, August 28, 2002 Merzbow, Enclosure Libido Economy Well. This is different. Almost quiet. Well, if you're a noise artist, quiet is the great unknown. I think we may have accidentally stumbled upon beauty while taking out the trash. "Enclosure" is, ironically, enormous sounding -- gongs and piano wires, metal drums maybe, bowed and beaten in some big hollow space (where does he get to record these things?) where all sustained sounds are shadowed by ebbing drones, sort of like...umm...Rallentando. Terry Fox's Berlino/Rallentando. (Thank you, Mr. Internet.) Which I haven't heard FOR AGES. Masami Akita toys with boing-bleep electronic fuckery at the end but the warm glow of the beginning carries over it. I thought "Scarabe" might turn out to be just more subpar "tribal" drumming but some metallic skree comes and saves it at the very end, hooray. "Interline, No. 1-3" is the longest track here, and although I feel compelled to use this track as a jumping off to say something of interest, I don't. The metallic sounds that dominate this album get increasingly modulated electronically (via ring modulator, tapes, feedback mixer, effects, etc.) to the point where the original untreated sounds are harder and harder to recognize....though the phenomenologist in me might counter that Masami Akita's role in sound generation means there are truly no "untreated" sounds heard on this album. Then on "Itch" everything gets amped, like he was playing hardcore guitar. Switching from throaty rumble to chainsaw screech in short bursts, "Libido Economy, No. 1" generates a non-rhythm that's hard to pay attention to. Both sounds keep collapsing into each other without turning into ONE sound. The second one, "Libido Economy, No. 2," has the same short bursts, this time folding in nuggets of bow-on-metal sounds (that always seem to threaten to reach a climactic peak) into slices of nebulized crunch. (link)

Tuesday, August 27, 2002 Merzbow, Mortegage/Batztoutai Extra If you thought "up your butt with a coconut" was a mildly disconcerting lyric, check out this out: "Anus Anvil Anxiety." Yeah, it's real, but as a track, no loops and no obvious structure = trouble. It's a whole lot of musical muttering. I might as well tell stories about grandfather instead. The good thing about the last few albums is that I now know what I like from my Merzbow, and I can confidently say it isn't this. I'm not even interested enough to make a token stab at describing the textures. "Radio 1511" is a little more promising. I'm guessing it's intended as a free interpretation/recreation of the sounds found in shortwave radio: warped, harshly distorted voices and manipulated guitar feedback simulating random electronic beeps, whirrs and clangs, plus gamelan and street sounds. Ah, yes, and sure enough, some actual radio noise (or what sounds like real radio noise), a tuner going throught the radio spectrum very fast and violently. Kinda dull until at the very end Masami Akita assaults the listener with the full array of all the sound sources he's been playing with. ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Another reviewing stoppage again, with me thumbing through the latest issue of The Wire and eating a big plate of take-out Penne alla Vodka rather than tackle this last cut. Well, doesn't matter, it seems like an odds 'n' sods album of outakes and alternates anyway. The last track has a nasty sadistic edge to it. Masami Akita plays around with these samples of a little girl screaming. In pain? Out of playfulness? Hard to say, and MA doesn't make it any easier by surrounding it with OTHER NOISE SHIT then dropping it entirely. Other sound sources, mainly chintzy instrumental music (practically cartoon music -- crappy pop records, exotica, marches, dixieland and so on) gets destructured in a similar way, as if to suggest an equivalence between the two sound sources. And that's kind of disgusting. Yeah, I do insist on certain hierarchy of sounds, that certain sounds aren't to be "aestheticized" -- but turning cries of pain into a mere sound object has the potential to numb us not merely to the sounds of pain but to pain itself (we humans aren't always sophisticated enough to distinguish the two with any consistently). Towards the end, there are sounds of a grown man in pain and laughing maniacially, as if it's meant to serve as the mirror image of the little girl. What could it mean? Beats the shit outta me. (link)

Monday, August 26, 2002 Merzbow, Sadomasochismo/The Lampinak Seems kinda stupid to listen to this with a headache, so I didn't bother to last night. Yet here am I, again. How does that work? First one's got a crazy cement truck beat so it almost sounds like "Disposable Teens," then backwards guitar parts like sustained droning horns overlapping upon one another, real apocalyptic shit. I could like this. I could like this a lot. I keep wanting to know how it'll change (because of course it will) but it could go on as far as I care. The last one was "Antimony, Part 1" -- the next one is "Antimony, Part 2" and they have no obvious relation to each other, much less any relation to the elemental/alchemical metal antimony. Well, they do seem to have a structure similarity: metallic-ish first part, abrupt white noise breakdown, extended part with drony loops. Could they be based upon each other? (Which came first?) There's a really shrill part here that reminds me I have to get better speakers. I do not have the most optimal stereo set-up I could have. The speakers, especially, are terribly limited. (As a pointless aside, I want to point out that there are some moments of extreme stereo seperation -- the speaker on the left might momentarily go completely dead, for example.) Such gorgeous applications of feedback here: they stutter in the stereo field all bauble-like. Diamonds are hard, too. Is it wrong for me to say that this album feels quite masterful because it seems never to offend MY limits as a listener? The tracks seem to undergo radical shifts in sound just before I get stop concetrating. It is masterful because Masami Akita knows to play around these limits of boredom and frustration, or, since intentionality is absurd when discussing Merzbow, is the fact that these tracks don't bore some oddball coincidence -- Merzbovian noise and my sensibilities just clicking together by accident? These rhythms are making me feel an exoticist jungle fantasy thing here something fierce. And with "Village of 8 Graves," he makes noise (yeah, noise) out of layered birdsound, faint chanting, altered guitar-sound. All sound seems to echo out into some unseen distance, fueling paranoia. Kick-ass! (link)