Thursday, September 19, 2002 Merzbow, SCUM/Steel Cum Jesus, the titles. We are promised the rock. There is the expectation to rock. Drums ready to rock. Guitar to rock. All sorts of random shit -- ready to rock. Even a rockin' title: "Mona," an homage to Chuck Berry, presumably. And all we're left with is the feeling of expectation. Another "Nude Variation" and I can't honestly tell what it has to do with the last one. More electronics on this. Hell, more electronics on this than just about anything else I've heard so far: writhing shifts of tone, roiling vrooms, whinneys, squeaks and moans. Kind of gross, kind of orgiastic. And with "Duck Exercise" we are promised the rock again! The drumming is pure high school -- junior high school, really (not I could do any better). Already it promises to be a schizophrenic experience as we've just gone through a complete shift of tone with now some ghostly scrapings, replaced by a thick sandwich of experience where only the juiciest bits are visible. Details barely announce themselves and disappear before thoroughly digested. But this is rock, alright. A drummer does his thing and many fuck-up guitars do their respective things, including things which sound nothing like guitars (nothing new there) to completely mess up your bearings and make you forget that this is rock (really!). Without riffing. "Duck Exercise" = "Duck Walk," so rock idol and sad pervert Chuck Berry can't be too far away, inspiration-wise. Now I think this is what a ton of broken glass would sound like, if it fell down. Long stretches of time go by where I can't hear anything that has the unmistakable influence of the human hand. Everything is mediated. Signals go into machines, are spat out and fed into other machines, cycle around, transformed, transformed again, stored, and resurrected. An endless sonic food chain which ends (presumably) with the listener...unless the listener is willing to transform the signals he's recieved and shoot them back out into the world, i.e., unless the listener makes his own noise records or something else. This doesn't always happen. Not every seed sprouts. The sound is waiting and preparing to strike. So I don't pay attention. Then after a while, my psyche sharpens a bit, and I find something engaging about it when I hear. But before I can quantify just what (and boy is it hard) it ceases to be interesting. So, now: it rumbles really nicely with a good squeaky wheel foreground. That's all I can say. Then what seems like a low rumble resolves into sharp, scratching detail. Last track is simply called "Body." I sense a certain degree of glibness here. (link)

Wednesday, September 18, 2002 Merzbow, SCUM/Severences A more rock feel. Drums that wouldn't feel out of place in a jam played in some godforsaken "blues club" somewhere, overwhelmed by a obscuring howl so that the percussion never seems to be leading the howl somewhere. Howl and drums exist in two seperate sonic worlds, and their coexistence in my room is but a chance meeting. Actually, the howl doesn't seem to come from anywhere you could locate. There is no implied physical space that produces it. It is nowhere. Oh, there's a guitar there, too. Something like Neil Young. Then backwards masking and squiggly sounds: full of sound and fury, signifying monkeys. Metal clanging AGAIN and I cannot emphasive the AGAIN enough, arrrgh. Well, that rock feel was nice while it lasted, eh? The first track ends with many collding scrims of gauzy warped mauk; the second track begins with all that but quieter. Waves no not waves but irregular pulses no no shimmers of...shimmers. Metal shimmers. A man sawing something, contained in a protective cloud of IT SHIFTS AGAIN idiot mbira IT SHIFTS AGAIN shrieking martians on old Halloween records IT SHIFTS AGAIN way-ho! very chintzy synthesized stuff, pure EuroCasio, the campiest moment yet on a Merzbow record. As he agressively spritzes blood & jism all over a poor lil' defenseless bit of cheese, it's all so deeply corny, not just what he's reacting to but how he's reacting to it. Odd. Usually he's kept his anger close to his vest -- there's always aggression but never seems focused on anything in particular. I'm sensing a pattern here. Just rock motifs sprinkled throughout these tracks, the drums mainly. If it weren't for that, the last track would be pretty normal. The title is a bunch of rock & roll names, including "Deaf Forever" (Motorhead) and "Wild Thing" (The Troggs). Basically it's rock themes purposefully hobbled by avant-crap like hyperactive phasing sounds and bursts of other records, mainly jazz and orchestral things. FITE! Oh no!! Lo vs. Hi!!! OH NO!!!! (link)

Tuesday, September 17, 2002 Merzbow, SCUM, Vol. 2 I'm up for more abuse. Piano wires again, but with a difference. Can't put my finger on it. They seem to be hooked up to something which makes the sound give off peculiar, unearthly resonances -- almost like a steel drum -- and before I can enjoy it the sound blooms into incoherence and THEN silence and a whole new set of sounds, keyed by...I dunno. A drill? A drill hooked up to something which makes the sound give off peculiar, resonances -- almost like a human voice shouting. Oh, it's an electric shaver. Merzbow -- the man, the noise -- just wouldn't make any sense without stereo. Sure, noise records could probably be made using the obsolete recording and playback technologies of the early 20th century. In fact, Christian Marclay did just that on More Encores in his "Louis Armstrong" piece. But I can't imagine a world where even the most blighted subculture consumes noise-works with wax cylinders, say. Or even AM radio. Even at its most abstracted from real-world sound-sources, even at its most white-noisiest (or pink-noisest -- I really should learn the difference) what MA does demands a high fidelity world. (Thought experiment: how many musical genres can you say that about?) This all may be noise, but the noise needs to be vivid and impactful. Also, as I've made abundantly clear, again and again, MA uses stereo seperation all the time in his work to create dislocation. And that's to say nothing of his reliance such late 20th-century sonic inventions as amplification and electronic/digital sound. Gosh, what would it sound like in Quad? Or one of those space-specific works I've seen Maryanne Amacher. Hm. Maybe they are and I just don't have the gear for it. I think that's the Merzbow I like best -- the Merzbow that keeps trying to dislocate the listener, even in the midst of the listener's dislocation. No, in point of fact my favorite Merzbow is the later stuff where everything is electronically or digitally processed in some way. It's all so much more TACTILE RIPPLING PULSING SATURATED than the stuff I'm listening too now, which is too heterogeneous to be interesting, and too reliant on real-world sound sources that are just too familiar to me. Piano wires AGAIN? Anyway, his works that are obviously "constructed" in the virtual studio of his hard-drive are more deliberate, less hit-and-miss about the effects MA wants to induce in the listener. On to "Great Nude Variation, No. 1." For some reason I thought this title might be an homage to Tom Wesselman but now I'm not sure. No, no...I AM right. There was a Merzbow record called Great American Nude and that's clearly named after Wesselman's paintings. See? What the two have to do with each other, I haf no idea, etc. (link)

Monday, September 16, 2002 Merzbow, SCUM, Vol. 1 Pissed off, tired from work. Yeah, I'm in the right mood alright. And here comes this SOUND, this sound that's EXACTLY like one in Varèse's "Poème Électronique," (appreciate those accents, damnit) it's like echoey metal scraping and I'm wondering of it's a sample or produced in exactly the same way. Time progresses and its not so much scraping as it is savage beating. Ooh, this isn't so bad. It isn't as willful as most of his other pieces. More determined. One thing comes on as another drops off the interest meter. Yeah, I've said similar things before but I'll say them again. I can't imagine my words being any more monotonous than what they describe...right? Sometimes the sounds get all dizzy. No tones unmolested. It's called "Cockchola," by the way, obviously a naughty variation of "coachella" or "cloaca" or "cochlea." The latter would be a Joycean pun that roughly translates as "dick in yo' ear," which means by listening to this track, I have become Masami Akita's bitch. OK, quickly now, the second track, um, it's based on tapes on circus organs and carousels, just like the end of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," by the grand dames of musique concrète (Appreciate those accents, again, damnit, because I now have nothing to say about the third track. Or the fourth one.) But the fifth track, the fifth track has the sounds phased like...oh, yet another unlikely comparison...the vooooom sounds in the Eagles' "Life in the Fast Lane," and lordy here comes the organ sounds again. But it's mainly this low nascent roil that threatens much worse, that threatens a real explosion of disconcerting sound. Fuck it, I'll finish this tomorrow. I'm back. I know what this is like. This is like being in a very fast car. And I've never been in a really fast car, so I don't really know. But I would imagine it would be "kinetic" -- all active in feel. In retrospect, one of the main oddnesses of listening to Merzbow is having my head stay perfectly still while sound crumbles all around. My body should be thrown back at the destructive force of this noise, but it isn't. It only seems fair that I should be instinctively recoiling from this music the way audiences did when George Barnes "shot" at them in the end of The Great Train Robbery. This album could really use a harmonica or a glockenspiel. We get instead a mbira made of an air-conditioning vent. Or maybe that's just a massively detuned guitar. (A car honks outside my apartment and I think it's part of the made musical parade.) What? I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention. OK, OK, so what do we have here: it's distortion! Hooray! Can we go home now? (link)

Sunday, September 15, 2002 Merzbow and Achim Wollscheid, KNIR Transformation Sounds to me like there are fairly extreme stereo seperations for the same sound here, breaking up that sound almost as if you were recording something on your tape desk while shifting the input button from the CD player to a dead channel, again and again and again. Clunky white noise on the left, then clunky white noise on the right, then in chorus, then silent except for background noise which seems to be undergoing a similar process. Sometimes it's even completely silent. Shifting rhythms seem to be involved but I can't put my finger on a single one. It's also hard to tell what exactly this noise they're playing with is, other than that it involves something metal, no doubt. There's no high end on this track AT ALL. This album is only one track -- the song has the same name as the album -- and it's only forty-five minutes long rather than an hour and I can't tell you how happy that makes me. The track seems to grow denser and denser, though the only tangible difference is the addition of a murky horn sample of some kind which seems to follow the same quasi-rules as the initial clunky white noise sample. Another...something comes along and rattles my speaker's woofers. About nineteen-and-a-half minutes into it the scene shifts just a little bit; the rhythms are changed and a high-pitched squeal enters into it. A minute later, it changes somewhat more radically, with a new (if similar) clunky white noise thing bouncing dully (then shrilly) on and off between speakers. This mild break in the monotony might be as dramatic as the cannons in the 1812 Overture had I paid attention. Or maybe not. Sometimes MA's methods of breaking monotony after looong stretches of one idea seem palatable, other times they seem as predictable as the monotony that preceeded it. It's like he can't really continue this, can he? He can't, of course, so faint then not-so-faint rumbles jump around the stereo field. Eventually it works its way back to what sounds like fairly typique Merzbovian white noise except for all those damn audio stutters. Just think what he could do with a bunch of some skipping CDs. (link)