Thursday, September 05, 2002 Merzbow, Fission Dialogue I can't find a decent photo of a gamelan orchestra right now, but Timothy Ferris once described it as "a vision of the Industrial Revolution gone off in a joyful direction...a full gamelan looks as if it could haul a dozen freight cars through a mountain cars through a mountain pass if the cosmos were put together a little differently." "White Gamelan" is the sound of that alternate-universe engine, stripped for parts. Thuddy percussion on the right channel, very sharp metallic bowing sound, frequencies all over the place, almost a honking sound, getting louder, now getting softer. The right getting closer to a discernable rhythm, the left turns into honky-tonk tinkles. Sudden shifts and returns, Hesitant silences and subtle electronic treatments, the usual. Fission is the splitting of parts; dialogue is the interplay of parts. "Fission Dialogue," both as title and noise, suggests both. Sometimes there's extreme lateralization between the right and left channels, where (for example) the left speaker will play something the other speaker won't, and sometimes both seem to share a sound, albeit slightly different versions of that sound. Switching the sound so it's 100% from one channel then 100% the other highlights their differences. Afterwards, keeping both speakers perfectly balanced -- taking both parts of the track together to create the whole -- makes the track seem utterly holographic and unrooted. Ends with the nastiest amped-up sound I've heard from this series of Merzbow albums since, oh, the Pornoise set. "Inside Tounge in Tera-Aspic." I presume it's a play on King Crimson's Lark's Tongues in Aspic but the "inside" I'm not too sure about. Tera- is a prefix meaning "trillion" or, going back to the Greek teras, monster. Sounds fitting to me. It approaches Keiji Haino heaviness in parts, especially in its quieter moments. Out of a dreamy foam of white noise, details rise to the front, lacerate, but unfailingly shift, fade in and out. The foam level rises and things get worse and worse, but imperceptably, like the frog that never percieves the fatal temperature shift in a pot of water. Other than there seems to be a gradual raising of volume, a heightening of stakes, I can't get a handle on what the highs and lows, shifts and continuities within the piece are doing, if anything. The same could be said of much of MA's other long tracks. They're way too big to be digested whole in one sitting. On the way towards the end, we meet the lawnmowers I used wake up to every Saturday morning, back when I lived in the suburbs. The end itself overtaxes my speakers with the rumble of an oppressive cloud of Hendrixisms...only that none of this seems to be created with a guitar. (link)

Wednesday, September 04, 2002 Merzbow, Storage Sleep is the enemy of responsible rock criticism. I was all set to review Storage last night but was overcome with drowsiness and a complete lack of things to say. So I thought, hey! I can listen to this while I lay on bed and I can mull over the album first. I ended up with an hour of restless, sweaty sleep, with all my half-decent ideas evaporating on waking. So I start, start again. This is a treacherously difficult album to talk about. Masami Akita once again toys with the super-shrill highs and glowing lows of metallic sounds that he started exploring (for some reason, I cringe at that word) on Enclosure Libido Economy. There's not much I can remember that distinguishes that album from this one. There's not much that distinguishes track from track, or one moment from another moment in two seperate tracks, or even different moments within the same track. This album is a steady-state system of complete irregularities. I happen to find a lot of moments within it -- such as the first track a third of the way through -- eminently satisfying. Why, I can't say. I don't feel like much of an expert on why I like the things I like. Approached with a certain kind of criticality, my tastes don't make much sense. They have no internal consistency (why pleasure in sawed piano wires and not styrofoam?) and aren't grounded in anything more than the fact that the reactions I have do exist, and have something to do with pleasure and displeasure. This bugs me not because I can't connect my decisions to something much greater than myself, like some Platonic Eidei or neo-Platonic The One, but that all expressed decisions of taste end up reducing to "I like X because I like X," and it's the artist in me that finds this unimaginative and monotonous. OK, so listening in a little closer (and fully conscious) this time around, I notice this album isn't all the same. "War Storage, Part 2" erupts into silence and concreteness and distortion, as if MA himself suddenly got oppressively bored with all this scraping of piano wires and boinging of bowls. I enjoy thinking that me and MA share some of same limits of boredom. Makes him less of an alien supersadistic superaesthete. The third track is all those piano string sounds again, layered and layered and layered so that were it not for this growling undertone undertow sounding somettimes like a chainsaw, sometimes like a engine motor, the track would approach white noise conditions. (link)

Sunday, September 01, 2002 Merzbow, Live in Khabarovsk, CCCP The idea of Russian port city Khabarovsk -- as opposed as to its actual condition, something I know nothing about -- has an enticing dismalness to it. The first track isn't quite the maelstrom of much of his earlier works. There's even a piano on that lends a degree of normalcy to the proceedings, at least at the beginning.In general, it's got more in common with his earlier idiot-avant instrumentals than his white noise signal drenches. I hate to admit this, but the thing that really interests me the most about the first track is how Masami Akita was able to get away with doing his Merzbow thing in the USSR back in '88. One also wonders Khabarovsk could host a "Jazz & Experiment Music Festival." Yes, yes, yes...it's during the dawn of glasnost and all, but even then, surely Masami Akita was being shadowed by the KGB just as surely as rock and techno artists are to this day. Or so I would gather from Don Watson's article on Izhevsk in the September issue of The Wire. (Early childhood memory: a CBS news report on a group of USSR visual artists who had put on a guerilla exhibition in a public space, only to have the police mow it down with bulldozers -- bulldozers! -- the explanation being that the site was to be transformed into a people's park "for rest and culture.") I don't really know how to take the martial beats of "Live at Soviet Army Officers House Hall 24 March 1988." For a couple of minutes, it closely resembles the very beginning of "Sunday Bloody Sunday." Then it slowly becomes apparent that the live ensemble appears to be playing off some worker's anthem (or anthems) from back in the day, and that these anthems themselves appear, with rippling distortions, somewhere in the background. It's the closest thing to straight ahead rock MA has done since...since I can't remember. The first couple of albums as Merzbow, I guess. There's even some almost funky cowbell action. Good God, y'all. Up comes a bit of the distorted symphonic stuff, and it sounds like classic shoegaze, then until the very end, the appropriated music is ditched and the band goes for more straightahead drum-driven "jam." (link)