Monday, September 09, 2002 Merzbow, Crocidura Dsi Nezumi Oh dear. This must be the long afternoon of Masami Akita's career. More acoustic events occuring in a great big space. No massing of sound, no oppression, no big deal. Not even especially noisy or quiet. Am I irritated with this? I suppose I am. For a noise artist I'll forgive anything except the appearance of career stasis. Ooh! It sounds like Godzilla now. I take it all back. I don't know why I'm getting so pissed. It takes just about forever for most Merzbow tracks to reveal themselves anyway. Not like I expect this one to. This must be the least interesting album I've heard so far. Lord, how I miss the crass attempts at popform with Mechanization Takes Command or the Pornoise series. This, on the other hand...this is just Storage re-hash. (Heh. Spoken like a real Merzbow trainspotter.) Alright. So the second track ("Mustela Sixasa Namiyei") has a little more urgency because there's some bongos driving it along to absolutely nowhere and, hey, here comes the noise and it's theatening to engulf the proceedings. It makes the first track sound like a warmup session. The third track? Oh, I dunno. (link)

Sunday, September 08, 2002 Merzbow and SBOTHI, MERZBOW + SBOTHI Collaborative Everytime I start on a Merzbow album I think I'll never find anything to say about it but usually I do find some unique angle that satisfies me (if not you). "Merzbow worked with raw materials submitted by Achim Wollscheid" on "Joint" but I don't hear anything especially un-Merzbovian except the guitar seems a little more heavy in a rocka-rolla way than I've heard from Masami Akita. About six minutes way from the end there are these Drones with upreached spikes of jewel-like feedback and metal-on-metal scraping, and that prevents me from getting bored. Apart from that it's fairly boring. It seems to be structured in a "and then I did this sound, and then I came up with this sound, and then I came up with this one," etc. I suppose I should be listening to something else to cleanse the palate in between this sampling of Merzbow records, or maybe other records to create a context in which to understand Merzbow better, but instead I've been reaching for all the old, familiar examples of catharsis, I've just been listening to many of the same records I've been listened to in the last year instead. "Code-Gerarusch-Aggregate" is like "Join" but...quieter. A lot quieter. Great big slabs of silence in this one, and when no silence, often there are tiny moments of mysterious delicacy that seem alien to Masami Akita's temperment, like little tinkly bonks on woodblocks and theremin (or oscillator) swoops. A lot of times noises rise up and fall so fast it reminds me of that someone's turning the volume button very fast. Other times the sounds are very brief and very quiet and all alone, bookended by longish moments of nothing at all. It invades consciousness through being quiet, and hence eminently ignorable, rather than (say) subtle changes in crashes of monsta noize. This means I really ought to turn off the air-conditioner when I listen to it. "Jointed"'s lovely moment is a bit of warpy orchestral music samples...which reminds me that this was made in 1988. Had I heard this back then, I'm not sure I would've liked it, but I definitely would've characterized this as one of the fringe edges of the sample-culture of '88 (absolute dead center: Public Enemy) that I thought utterly kicked ass at the time. Listening to it in 2002, though, and in the context of all his other works that used "found sound," it doesn't sound like it owns anything to the spirit of the time at all. (link)