Thursday, September 26, 2002 Merzbow, Music For True Romance Vol. 1 Close to four minutes' worth of an almost completely unaltered eight-second martial drum loop, and then, as if that didn't irritate you enough, two-and-a-half minutes of looped quasi-medieval wheedley-deedley-dee. Then we get down to business. Some layered drones, low. Noise enters in slowly; eventually everything unfolds and seperates out a bit. Sounds a little louder. The moment you spot a rhythm, something fucks it up. Or it lingers far too long for comfort. Somtimes a stereo channel drops out somewhat and it's as if the sound has been sucked right back into the speakers. About midway through (by the way, this track is "She Floating - Prepration") we get our first faint glimpse of in-the-world sound -- some mallets pounding metal. Soon he'll get rid of it altogether, one hopes. It's close, though. The sounds are not obviously electronic, because it has none of the clean-sounding bleeps and bloops and whirrs and one typically associated with electronic-generated sound. But it can't be anything else. CRASH! BOOM! And then some electric bass guitar that could've been recorded back in the sixties. CRASH! BOOM! And then some electric bass guitar that could've been recorded back in the sixties. CRASH! BOOM! And then some electric bass guitar that could've been recorded back in the sixties. CRASH! BOOM! And then some electric bass guitar that could've been recorded back in the sixties. CRASH! BOOM! And then some electric bass guitar that could've been recorded back in the sixties. CRASH! BOOM! And then some electric bass guitar that could've been recorded back in the sixties. He's pushing it. This is the fortieth Merzbow album I've reviewed, and not once have I said anything about his Mom. Or his dad. Because you do have to wonder -- and yeah, you have to, it's mandatory -- what they think of him having ANYTHING to do with ANYTHING called "She Mutilation - Main Ritual." The holiday seasons must be painful. Loops! Good God! Can't get enough of them. Kind of a monotonous ork vamp in the background, the drum loop from before...OK, OK, now he fucks it all up with the more dark minor chord orchstral vamping and the wheedley-deedley-dee. For the moment, I like this a lot. I probably won't a minute from now. You can feel that agonizing momentum with every sludgy repeition; a soundscape crawling on the desert floor looking for a Sprite. When it lifts, it reveals an unstable soundtrack fantasia which turns out to be a loop and that gets infested with noise again, trudging toward the horizon, lost in a maze of dub mirrors. Am I supposed to think about women in bondage here? So here comes the main track, and it promises to be twenty-two minutes of sample-fucking. Male stentorian vox and marching rhythms, music florid but stern -- reactionary kitsch of a hated generation. The American music which most immediately resembles it would have to be Mitch Miller sing-a-long albums. The title is "Injured Imperial Soldiers' Marching Song" suggest they're militaristic in subject. So what I could be witnessing is a little cultural tiff between MA and his countryman. On the other hand, I'm an American, Masami Akita's from Japan, and my country won a war with his about sixty years ago. So that could be a part of it. I don't know. (link)

Wednesday, September 25, 2002 Merzbow, Stacy Q, Hi-Fi Sweet Leaf Ohh great! I love Stacy Q! But it doesn't sound anything like Stacey Q! How rude! I'm not up on my Black Sabbath but behind the excoriating loop are guitars going "quong," sort of quasi-proggish, and that seems to me them. Oh, and that's definitely "Mother's Little Helper." And there's the Stacey Q: some floating chick voices and shards of standard issue club beats circa '86. And that's unquestionably Conlon Nancarrow. After a little research, it's "Study for Player Piano No. 3b." He's got great taste. Or in all likelihood, the sound sources are utterly irrelevant -- Masami Akita is trying to stew together the loved and the hated and the indifferent (or some combination of the three) for maximum cognitive dissonance. But is listening to this album gonna turn into nothing more than a game of spot-the-sample? I think it will. Except there's a couple of things here that I suppose a few Japanese rock hits from the sixties and I wouldn't be able to identify anyway. But it feels like I should. Sounds still retain their basic shapes of rock signification. I can tell that is (or was) a guitar, a drum, a human voice doing something it wouldn't have done without the existence of the blues. But identifying that isn't enough. So I listen very very intently, trying to undo the layers of pulsating distortion and scarring loopage to get to the original. That might be Stockhausen's Hymnen. And that's definitely Black Sabbath -- it's got the heaviness. And there's the cuckoo. Not a cuckoo, really, but a loop of a percussive moment sounds something like a cuckoo. The track is "Decomposed Cuckoo," you see. Odd, since MA is rarely that straightforward when it comes to titling tracks. Except now I see that by accidentally putting them on shuffle mode, I got the tracks mixed up! That was actually the title track, the one I'm listening to now is "Cuckoo." (So I'm listening to them in bass-ackawards order, you see.) And here I don't really hear any samples though that might change. What I do hear are hungry electronic jackals slurping soup while an air-conditioner starts whirring away its last moments as a working machine. This is a very rhythmic track -- rhythmic in the way motors or thunder sometimes are. Subtley rhythmic. Peaks and troughs in the sound aren't well defined. The rhythms are almost indistiguishable from sludge. This is how I should understand the tracK: something composed of layers upon layers of pulsing rhythms, relieved on a occasion by passages of blossoming feedback. It really kicks ass towards the very end: an ear-splittingly effulgent drone breaking through the noise and then a siren announces the end (of something). (link)

Tuesday, September 24, 2002 Merzbow, Hannover Cloud There are moments when I can imagine that little beeping sound on the left might be generated from a guitar. You can get a sense of a hand pressing a guitar string between two frets, muting and releasing tweety feedback when placed just the right amount of distance from an amplifier. Honestly, I don't know -- I have no sense of how one can control feedback. All my attempts with my guitar have been dismal failures. Had I not heard the last ten or so albums, I may not have any idea that those "plucking" or "dripping" sounds (that's the closest I can accurately describe them and that's not close at all) are Masami Akita doing what loves doing with metal again. That's a good indication of how ruthlessly abstracted these sounds are. Nearly every place on the web that uses the phrase "Magnetic Void" comes from a Battlestar Galactica fanpage! One page I can only get cached at Google says "The Magnetic Void is a vast area of space where normal sensors and communications don't work." If we take this definition seriously within a Merzbovian context (it's the title of the first track) then we must conclude the title signifies Masami Akita being a hardass -- you know, these sounds can't be consumed through normal means. Perhaps it also signfies Merzbow is an unashamed sci-fi geek. I had to stop to correct my archive (I didn't have a link to Om Electrique!) and now I'm back. "Rocket Bomber" = a return to the rock, with tired drums, guitar and a fairly of spavined white noise outbursts whose energy picks up a bit when MA applies some fierce howling that's not really all that audible anyway. THEN the noise just BURSTS open (damn, I wish I had a better stereo system) and the rock is far behind us. Maybe it's allegorical. This white noise stuff is always more satisfying when it veers closer to the bassier end of things -- which by definition makes it something other than white noise, but let's ignore that. Actually, I know, what I want to say is that I prefer drones over noise, or noise that approaches drone qualities. Lao When silences are played with, the top clouds break open, revealing details underneath. "Untitled Cock" is actually quite silenceful in a spastic way. You can hear between the little orts of sample clumps. "Autopussy Go No Go 2" may have something to do with "Autopussy Go No Go." After some study of what I wrote about the latter track, it seems it utilized samples. So does this. A bunch of them. In fact, it could be entirely composed of stuttering, shrieking samples, I don't know. I have to listen closely but of course, what I hear seems so fucking eccentric that it fights valiantly against any efforts spent on concentration. Eventually those stuttering bits of noise start to seem persevering, and out of perservering, grand...but only just a bit. It takes quite to overcome my sleepiness, even if for just a bit. (link)

Monday, September 23, 2002 Merzbow, Newark Hellfire - Live at WFMU, USA This is one of Masami Akita's most monochrome slabs of noise. Eight or nine minutes into it the sound loses its uniformity a little, revealing a kind of watery, juicy electric sound duels with some clang-clang-clang. And when the clang-clang-clang syncs up with the feedback, that's also keen. Also when the electronics are allowed moments to overwhelm. Or when it gets all SAWTASTIC (about twenty-five and forty-four minutes in). That's all good. Eventually the good stuff fades, as if MA and Reiko M. get too tired to fight against the white noise scum they've set up as the session's default mode. (If that's the case, I can't say I blame them much -- creating a sustained set of noise must be exhausting.) There are other moments I could talk about, but on the whole, it's too samey to enjoy. This is partly due of the limitations of FM radio -- you can easily tell that both the high and low end of the sonic spectrum lacks the punch it should have. But let's hear it for WFMU, eh? They parceled out close to an hour of godawful din that seems to have no mark of human intent. God bless them. (link)

Sunday, September 22, 2002 Merzbow, Cloud Cock OO Grand The guitars in "Brain Forest for Metal Acoustic Concret" almost resemble synthesizer drones, they're so pure and gleaming. They're so pure and gleaming they may not be guitars. Masami Akita also works the turntables something fierce. Every morsel of sound has the quick-cut disorientation of a Christian Marclay: the sounds "fk," "ft," "ts," "fs," "cluk," and "ee" are heard repeated a lot, usually in super-rapid succession. Kinda dates the record, really. There's something very time-specific to Marclay's (and here, MA's) approach to the turntable-as-instrument. Back in the late '80's/early '90's (Cloud Cock was made in 1989-1990, in fact) turntablist noise was avant-garde music that implicitly connected with the explosion of sample-based pop music such as hip-hop, house, acid house, techno, new jack, etc. Looking back, there's a common feel to the music of the time. It's stuff used samples to disorient or subvert, and so it's all so blippy and disjointed. Comically overhyper, and overhyperly comic. Not a bad thing in itself, but there are so many other approaches. (Take Philip Jeck, a turntablist that slows records down, often. So did Marclay but not enough.) A truly sublime organ buzz (you know, like in a pre-Emperor Tomato Ketchup Stereolab rekkid) continually tries to break through the metallic skree in "Spimmozaamen" and with it, I think, finally, MA has achieved RAW POWER. It has grandeur and a bigness that layer 1 of noise + layer 2 of noise + layer 3 of noise, etc. can't automatically achieve. You can hear the buzz go through many distortions, distortion of an incredible thickness, and that's good, too -- the sublime modulating into something more opaque. Then there's eerie, almost musical feedback wafting through, then later, a hollow, vacuum-y sort of sound. Good, good. Give me something to focus on in a track and I'll follow you anywhere, MA. Since this album goes up to one hour and eighteen minutes, I think this must've been one of the first Merzbow albums specifically tailored for the compact disc. Everything else has ranged from 45 minutes to a little less than an hour-ten, if I remember correctly. Ah, a loop. Haven't heard one of THOSE in a while. Kinda of a chicken-scratchy thing. Then sounds which rise ever upwards in tone and volume. About as corny as a proper orchestral swoop, but hey, I'm a cornball. There's no way to really tell what records MA is using in his turntablist explorations, since he fucks them up far too much for them to be identifiable. But I guarantee one thing -- he uses exotica records. Has to. It's something of a turntablist cliché, anyway. Oh, I know it too well. I jacked some of my mom's Martin Denny's records in mine, MA comes up with many of the same "cluk" and "clink" sounds I did. I can't blame him. They sound so distinctive sped up; that's why they were used so much and hence a cliché. "Modular" never seems to ever get very loud no matter how dense it gets. In fact, it seems to get softer as time passes. Can't focus on it too much. Maybe I'm already weary, or there's nothing much to focus on. Come to think of it, that's a strength. It was only a few albums ago that I was whining about how predictable MA's technique was of wedding layers of noise from no identifiable place to some bit of idiot-avant metal-on-metal instrumentalism obviously recorded in some large, sonically resonant space. Here, every element within the noise feels like they come from some nowhere place. (Those metal-on-metal sounds must be extraorindarily painful to hear up-close -- does he wear uplugs when he records them? Heck, in general, does he wear earplugs when he records? How about in concert?) Just when I thought he had no more trick up his sleeves for this album, turns out the last track, "Postfix," is BEAUTIFUL: those bowed metal sounds perverted into carousel music, into airplanes taking off, into bell-tones, into prickly robo-spiders, into fierce arcs of quicksilver. This is a tremendous album. (link)