Saturday, October 05, 2002 Merzbow, Rhinogradentia After a nap, I'm in a better mood, thanks. Title based on The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, a mildly obscure zoological fiction by Gerolf Steiner. This might be one of the earliest indications of Masami Akita's contemporary fascination with animal life, as indicated by Frog (which I ordered two months ago via Ebay and never received), the A Day of Seals 4CD box set extravaganza, and apparently Merzzow as well. A drum loop...how many freakin' times do I have to use that term? It's a flavorless word, says about as much as "guitar solo." It sounds like someone hammering aluminumm foil on butcher block, and it's got a DAH-dahdah-DAH-dahdah-DAH-dahdah beat. This drum loop and what I suppose what's a loop of electronics arcing and up down into infinity (this sound goes: weeeeeeooohhhhhhWEEEEEEEEEweeeeeeooohhhhhhWEEEEEEEEE) function as hooks and give the track a flavor of patient grinding inevitability in spite of all the jackhammer excresences elsewhere on the track. The hooks disappear midway through and throw everything into a percolating zen nowhere that sounds like quite a lot like everything else. I find I enjoy this exercise the louder I turn everything up. The neighbors? Oh, the neighbors don't seem to mind. I don't hear from them so I suppose it's OK, but everytime I hear someone pass by my door I think they can hear me. Well, I *know* they can hear me -- right outside, it's not oppressive or anything but it's definitely audible. Hearing these monstrous pulsing slabs, they must think I'm some freaked-out nihilist with a nerd exterior. They must think I shoot herion. I haven't consciously checked Merzmusic lately for the sounds of human fingers doing human things, but that was definitely a lonely guitar at the end of the title track back there. Is "Silver Scintillator" silver? I'm unsure. I'll have to ask my synesthete friend Fred Solinger some time, though I doubt he ever sees music as "silver." Light grey, maybe. Does it scintillate? You betcha. And HEY! There are such things as "scintillators." Some facet diamonds; others are involved in hardcore particle physics. Excellent title. The most kinetic example of his power electronics phase so far, all this pulsing and glinting and warping and squeaking and even a brief excursion back to his old beating-metal-around days of the late eighties. I was gonna say something about Pulse Demon and Op-Art, but here comes "Narco," this dry, dry, dismal low pulse with some tiny inconsequential tweets. Let's see if it changes much. It does, a little. It eventually unfolds as a fairly straightforward drone piece with a case of the electronic twitters. Can't talk much about drones, unfortunately. Well, a good drone by Charlemagne Palestine or the Spacemen 3 or Harold Budd can really get delightfully narcotic -- but this isn't doing quite that. Perhaps I'm not giving it half a chance. Four or so minutes to the end the relatively peaceful tone is shattered by crash of sound. It's not as dramamtic as it could be, though -- it seems almost flubbed and minor on purpose -- and soon enough this harsher sonic landscape develops its own heady stability. (link)

Merzbow, Marfan Syndrome Marfan's Syndrome "is a rare hereditary disorder that causes connective tissue to be weaker than normal...weak connective tissue causes problems of the skin, eyes, blood vessels, and bones." "Marfan Syndrome for Blue" starts almost like the title suggests, a kind of 'choogling' blues-rock beat created by some bassy electronics -- a beat that sometimes all the other extraneous sounds seem to follow. "Oldenburg's Soft Gun" must be big, phallic and squishily detumescent. The track itself detumesces in a most delightful way, going from about five minutes of standard issue power electronic noise, to a grand strummed guitar loop that's distorted so it's heavy on the bass. The foreground recedes and -- of all things -- a hefty jazz sample, probably from late fifties/early sixties Miles Davis peeks through like a scene viewed through two slow subway trains. The noise maelstrom from only a couple minutes ago is gone, completely and utterly, replaced by something of a more contemplative mood, which save for the ocassional super-high-pitched squeal, is pretty quiet. Quiet's relative here, though. It is still faint rumbles, bellowing, loopy squelchdrone and telephone dialing. You wouldn't play it for your ma. Merzbow : "Soft Gun" :: Can : "Chain Reaction/Quantum Physics." "Spider Next Castle, Part 1" quickly goes from having very few details within it stand out to having many of them -- bleeps and whines -- standing out. As with "Marfan," there are the faint hints of blues rhythms and structuring the chaos just a schoche. Later a horn fanfare loop that could've come from anything from Ornette Coleman or salsa or prog or Morocco or Phillip Glass pops up, its length getting shorter and shorter for completely inexplicable reasons. Hmm. This is shaping up to be a little disappointing. But I must, MUST carry on. "Um Br Che" is high-wailing lonesome guitar heroics seemingly plucked from a prog-rock record. Or maybe it's whale song. Either way, they don't seem created by Masami Akita himself. Soon the noise-scum lays off and reveals the whale guitar and...God, this puts me to sleep. I've been a trooper (I almost wrote "stooper") altight, but it's late afternoon and I want to take a nap really bad. I have to hand it to Masami Akita, though. For the last ten or so albums, each one of them is salted with at least one track that really sounds sonically distinct from everything else he ever made. This one has two. And I'm just not in the mood right now. I can't be bothered saying anything about "Yosef Voice," either. (link)

Wednesday, October 02, 2002 Merzbow, Red Magnesia Pink Noise in waltz-time, from what I can make out, with fierce electronic squeaking/sucking/tweeting sounds. Deliriously tactile. It implies shapes and colors and patterns the way the old stuff never could. Also think laser guns in space. There's a danger that these sounds will get as over-used and old hat as the "look-ma-no-practice" guitar burblings and the metal-on-metal bangery, but right now I don't care. Second track is 'compromised' a bit by a the appearance of a minute of two of Jimmy Bryant & Speedy West-like diseasy-listening from the 50's, but it annihilates itself quick. "Delta X" could be either a calculus or a radio term. See, this is all moving so fast that I don't have time to say anything terribly interesting. If "Tremolo Man" = Masami Akita, then Masami Akita = bad-ass. New words fail me at the moment, so let's fall back into old words like "texture." It's like looking into the loops and whorls of your hand when you're high. It's ALLLLL texture, indescribably thick, all little details pulsing around you in the soundscape, and all the details are in super-sharp focus. There's no sound that resists examinaton, no sound that can't stand out. When it's loud enough, it sounds like it's flying through your head. Another hardcore math reference with "Euclid's Picket." The title is too tempting to avoid parsing. Picket could mean protest, or it could mean something phallic (comes from the French piquer: to prick) that gets stuck in the triangle/vagina of Book I, Proposition I of The Elements. James Joyce uses the same idea in page 293 of Finnegans Wake. Also, from Ballard's Love and Napalm: "You must understand that for Travers science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space...One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops." Hahaha, anybody who could ever say THAT -- even in pale fish-faced irony -- has never wanked to dirty pictures OR solved a differential equation, so nyahh-nyahh twice over. Science has no hairy bottom. Anyway...both "Euclid" and "Chameleon Body" retreat into the fuzzier realms of excruciation, until the noise lets up a little in the latter so you hear the cause-and-effect. Heavily distorted metal-bashing gives off effluent sparks of electronic noise-squiggle with every distinct crash and smash (sounds being fed into machines, producing sounds that are fed into new machines again). "Little Bang" is more drones over rippling glorious drones and lightning-hot snaps and ruptures, except when it's boring. It goes out in a knot of electronic mess. Finally, I was reading some blogs rather than writing about the last track, because I can. (link)

Tuesday, October 01, 2002 Merzbow, Liquid City "Liquid City 17-1-95." When I search Yahoo! for "January 19, 1995," I get pages about the Kobe earthquake. "One of the reasons that areas of soft, water-saturated soil are hazardous is their potential to liquefy during strong seismic shaking. The shaking can suspend sand grains in waterlogged soil so that they loose contact and friction with other grains. Soil in a state of liquefaction has no strength and cannot bear any load." 7.2 on the Richter Scale and 6,000 dead. I can't remember having a reaction to the news, and this horrifies me now, since there have been events in my backyard -- no, no, my own house. When people used to ask me about where I worked, I would say, oh I live in the ...I mean, I WORK in the World Trade Center. In any case, this horrifies me because I know have numbers with which I can figure out a sense of magnitude to disaster. And why I couldn't bother to care about the 6,000, well, I have no answer to that. There are a million guesses as to why Masami Akita might have been prompted by a tragedy, by this particular tragedy to create something, and what connections, if any, we draw between the sounds and the experience. The track doesn't give any clues, but I am close to knowing than I was in 1995. What really holds my breath is a patient beeping that's barely audible throughout, the track's only bit of stability. (Please wait for further instruction. Stay calm. Do not panic.) "Dalitech Filters" isn't merely a surrealist pun. There really is a Dalitech, a manufacturer's rep for electronic components. The filters they sell come from the RFI Corporation, which happen to come from my old home town of Bay Shore. I don't particularly remember them. My "sense-of-place' for Bay Shore was always pretty crummy, due in large part to the fact that this was a typical suburban town and I absolutely don't know how to drive. But what does it sound like? "Dalitech" is a rainbow of tweets and swoops, launching from the febrile ground and accelerating off into affinity. The ground is alive! Alternatively, "filters" implies eletrical power channeled and controlled by human forces. Yet the sound implies: the pure products of electricity go crazy. Though I'm not sure what it "means" for the track to end with loops. "Tiabguls" = Slugbait, backwards. They're a band. That's all I know. A rich pulsing carpet...no. Gradually overwhelmed by...nevermind. I think "electronic cicadas" just about covers it. After the flailing tyrannical fury of the last few tracks, the thing the "Cheese Car Commando" really has going for it is its title and those Oval-like glitch rhythms that aren't rhythms. It snakes off up into the heavens. (link)

Monday, September 30, 2002 Merzbow, Exotic Apple Sparks. Sounds comes in like an electrical plug being jiggled midway between "out" and "in." (Or a microphone or headphones -- there are even rapid channel shifts.) Hence, this is not power, or raw power, but power standing on the verge of getting it on. Get your motor running. "Moon Over the Bwana A" uses what sounds like music for aerobics, so it's got some nice sleaze. The mechanics of sex, as if that wasn't obvious, as if, like Duchamp, he hadn't already made the equation between the two abundantly clear. There are some truly, truly irritating synth squeaks and squelches. Then a didgeridoo. This is conceptually making no sense whatsoever. From the sound of it, "Apple Rock 1" does not rock yet: just electronic screams and a faint continuous bloop-bloop sound. Another loop of dull aching thuds. Voices. "Ahhh...Bon Voyage, my friend!" A pretty piano loop that wouldn't be out of place on a Wu-Tang record. It is a stew of sounds, and while stews do not rock, they can stick to the ribs. This is the gentlest soundscape he's ever done. It menaces, yes, but like a Jean-Michel Jarre record or something. A guitar comes on! Faint and fuzzy, but it plays something recognizably and CONVENTIONALLY rock, proggy even. The faint whiff of krautrock, like Amon Düül II. Hisses and squeaks rise, arc like rainbows, fall. Things fuzz out. I'm late! I'm late! I'm late for a very important date! A faster tempo for "Apple Rock 2," but still that krautrock groove and those trancey repetitions. The blissful motorik digested and vomited back out by someone for whom repetition and fucking are never far away. Unstable tones bubble all around, and degenerate into pulses and rhythms. Sometimes it sounds like scratchin'. Guitars like Klaxon horns, adding a note of non-specific warning. Just when I think he had finally strayed from rock like he always does (it's an obsession with him) a clumsy loop of...what is it? Mellotron, maybe comes in and adds some borrowed drama. "Apple Rock 3" starts with a pretty synth loop that's practically electroclash; then it gets warped and furzed-out, sounding even more electroclash. Synthdrum skitters. Another guitar loop, one that sounds pratically horn-like; another girl singer loop frozen into perpetually declaiming some kind of joy or regret. All I want to say about "Apple Rock 4" is that it is full of twitty sizzle in the midst of some good ol' footstompin' rock & roll! (link)

Sunday, September 29, 2002 Merzbow, Sons of Slash Noise Metal "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." Or something close to it. 16:53. Or something close to the original. I believe that's a Stooges sample I think that's a Stooges sample -- the beginning of "1969." A few near-subliminal overamped rhythm section loops. These are the only coherent things about the first track. I gotta ask: what is UP with the hard-rock fetish here? It was there at least as far back as Mechanization Takes Command but the widespread use of samples makes it way overt. (Plus, he's actually manipulating this music, whereas on all that early stuff, music and radio broadcasts were just part of the noise-weather.) He's trying to incorporate *rock* and its spiritual essence itself into his über-rock. He using rock against rock. Electronics thunder and loom in a very identical way to much post-slayer metal, it just lacks the European element. No chord changes, and no tonality, either, as far as I can tell. Just hot molten lava. Or perhaps he, as one of the sons of Slash Noise Metal, intends to kill the father in a fit of Oedipal rage. Go, man, go! There's always this inexplicably awkward moment when I have to turn down the Merzmusic. After all that maelstrom, silence seems incomplete. Or, rather, after pummeling myself with this stuff for like a half-hour or so, turning it down seems like chickening out -- even though I'm alone in my apartment and I have no-one to feel embarrassed in front of. The noisescum gets kicked up a notch (sorry) in "Cross Toad" to Hoover-like levels of white noise and it sends little electronic twitters up into the air. Now it approaches beauty -- or maybe what I mean to say is that now my mind approaches attentiveness. Gosh, how tragic. I've listened to all these albums and haven't even fiddled with the minimal equalizer settings. Let's try. With the settings set to its trebliest, "Slash Embryo" resembles highly kinetic white noise. I've been throwing that term around fast and loose here, but what I mean in this case is a kind of krrssssshhhh hissy whisper sound. I think I'm gonna feel ill. Let's turn the other way around to the bassier settings. Sounds more palatable, but also softer. Either way, there is almost no detail. Most of the time, all detail is phantom. You couldn't get two people to agree that, yeah, that little filip of a rumble indeed existed -- it just raced past so fast -- unless someone did a detailed frequency spectral analysis of the track. And even if they tried, I dunno. MA spices it up towards the end with the occasional mid-low whine, stuff that sounds almost vaguely like a guitar, stuff that almost sounds vaguely like a voice. Either they're there for textural interest or try as he may, inadvertant details will always be part of the mix. Like the hiccups of silence towards the end. Maybe they're false endings. Oh god...they're malfunctioning CDs! (link)

Merzbow, Brain Ticket Death Today I figure that I'll do my laundry and review this Merzbow album at the same time. Or, to be more precise, I planned first I put clothes in the washing machine downstairs (which I have done), then listen to and write about a Merzbow album (I do both at the same time, more or less), return to my clothes about a half-hour's worth, put my clothes in the dryer, then review the rest of Brain Ticket Death, then pick up my clothes. As I've mentioned in previous reviews, it's been impossible to schedule an hour's worth of uniterrupted Merzbow time in my day, so I don't bother. If, like much of the 20th century avant-garde, Masami Akita is big on having the detritus of the everyday contaminate high art, then I think he'll understand. If he's also interested in returning the sense of ritual into high art, well, he's shit out of luck then. First track: airplanes, loops, machinery and so on. The hum of transmitters. Same with the second. I'm impressed muchly but right now I'm not feelin' it. Especially since I had very creamy food take-out food last night from a fine Italian restraunts round the way, and am suffering for it. I could go for something fresh and raw right now. When I pay attention to "Iron Caravan," it's great. In my mind's eye I can see the little twists and turns of sound follow yellow paths around the architecture of some infernal machinery. Eventually leading to moments of punctuation: the introduction of some clangrous moment, relative silence, a new loop, an annihilating bass drone. It's time for me to put the clothes in the dryer, but suddenly I don't want to. But I have to. Note to self: buy more "Bounce" fabric softener. There's something almost chord-like about the way the bottom drone carries itself in "Brain Ticket Death." That ends and a melting Hendrixoid loop...and then death metal drum loop comes into play. And then some porn! I think! A girl/adolescent sez: "Daddy! Daddy! I exist!" "Gosh! Believe me! Damn, believe me!" Actually, maybe it's not porn. Allmusic.com lists female vocalists for the early Brainticket albums, so this whole thing might be Brainticket-generated. Hmmm. Initially there was a forward-churning rock momentum thing going on -- Ministry with the noise cubed, say, but that seems to have been ditched in favor of more straightforward noise. As if noise could ever be straightforward. Something will come to me. I can wait. Sure enough, the more rockish sounds re-arrive as we get closer to the end: the track seems to moving in an arc-like fashion. Almost-music/noise/almost-music. Back to guitars and chord changes, ladled nicely with Merzbow scum. (link)