Sunday, October 06, 2002

Phew! I'm glad that's over with!

Come back to LOATD next week for my next trial-by-music: fifty reviews of fifty versions of "Send in the Clowns." E-mail me if you can think up a better name for this project than "Send in the Clones," OK?

(link)
     
     
Merzbow, Annihiloscillator

I have no idea if I've been spelling the title right the last few times I'm mentioned it. I'm pretty sure it's spelled right now. In any case, it's one of the all-time great rock album titles. (A sequel to Bruce Haack's The Electric Lucifer?)

"Hair Gun" is absolutely undeniable because it starts with a very firm, corruscating beat; I can rock back and forth in my the chair to it. It stops cold with some loops of electronic pulses at a galloping pace (perhaps that sounds redundant, but no, that's clearly what's done) and bloody fretwork. Loops return, but harsher and nebulized; then squeakier and purer. But beats are always there. You can't really dance to them. They have no give, nothing to offer the hips.

Yeah! Cookie Monster again! And if that isn't nostalgaic enough for you, "Kyoko Hamuras Air Clyster" starts with the kind of random bleepy sounds of those big nasty computers we thought were gonna take over the world one day. (BTW - A "clyster" is an enema so I don't really don't want to know what the rest might mean.) But steamrolling over that, conceptually and sonically, is the white noise crunch, the very same kind of sound he's worked on nearly all of the albums I know; but this time it's grander and harsher than I've ever heard it. It could not be denser. An on-the-runway recording of a plane taking off could not be denser. A recording of a nuclear explosion would probably be denser, but also impossible, so Masami Akita wins that one by default. Seriously, my stomach knots up even thinking about something like this being performed live. It could also be the grapefruit juice.

"Black Brain of Piranese" should probably be "The Dark Brain of Piranesi," an essay by Marguerite Yourcenar on the great architectural etcher of ruins, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Sometimes the sounds imply the kind of churchy ancient just by being really echoey; there's also a gigantic static synth drone just like in Motorond. Otherwise I think MA's making cultural connection I'm just not seeing. Perhaps it would've helped if I read the essay. It stutters to a close.

"Soft, Parts 1 and 2" is not followed by "Wet, Parts 1 and 2." Hahaha. Well, hold on, MA's the one who goes on about the eroticism of noise; ergo, I can make all the dumb dirty jokes I want when discussing his rekkids. Just when I was about to say it sounds like fighter planes rising and falling (not regular old passenger airplanes, like I just said earlier), some dark roiling electronics erase everything (maybe that's when the second part kicks in). The warplanes return. They seem to be generated solely by guitar and god knows what pedal accoutrements. Soft? Why soft? Is it some lame irony? Or something I'm not getting AGAIN? Arrgh, I don't care, I'm almost finished.

What's this last one? It's called "Wild Pair." MA mustn't have thought much of it because it's less than four minutes long. Effective, though. Noise proceeds in waltz-like rhythm, sometimes fading fast into white-noise hiss, then silence. Lots of silence here, punctuating the track. And then the final silence arrives.

(link)
     
     
Merzbow, Motorond

I guess I'll listen to this today, too, even though it's not really capturing my imagination. It seems to be very dimly recorded compared to the last string of albums. All sound is hidden by a mid-fi gauzy haze -- all thunder and no lighting. Little stands out. I suppose I could appreciate it as something of an eccentric drone piece. I'm racking my brains trying to think how this track might stand out against everything else he's done, and apart from the mid-fi, I can't come up with any distinguishing characteristic. Now wonder this went unreleased. Huh. Funny, because all the previously-unreleased '90's-era Merzbox stuff I've heard really CAN compare with the released stuff. There is always SOME excitment there. Enough to make you wonder why they weren't released -- there probably wasn't anybody willing to release them. I mean, he's already got enough product out there -- and there's STILL MORE. Sick as this sounds, when the next time I go to a record store, I'll probably pick up some recent Merzbow releases, maybe the seal thing. Amd how much you want to bet I'll only listen to it once or twice. I'm devoted.

Well, thats a nice drone underneath. Excuse the mildly obscure reference, but it's like the moment in Kid606's remix of "Straight Outta Compton" where it goes completely abstract and the original song turns into ringing bell tones. Took him long enough to get there, Jesus. The grunting and hyperventilating and Cookie Monster death-metal vocalisms later is fun, too. COOOOOOKIEEE! MYUM-MYUM-MUYM! AHHM-MYUM-MYUM-MUYM!

(link)
     
     
Merzbow, Space Mix Travelling Band

I love "Travelling 1997" because it has Merzbow wah-wah pedal action, so there's this near-human quality to the metallic groaning and whining. The Predator speaks. (They made a sequel? My anti-Hollywood mind boggles at the redundancy.)

I'm listening to this on my headphones for the first time in a long time, and it's oddly...uncomfortable. Not because the inhrent painfulness of the Merzsound, but removing those sounds from my apartment (nice ROCK bassy synth sounds there) -- and placing them in the virtual soundspace of somewhere between my ears -- seems to emphasize the weird unreality of what Masami Akita is trying to do. It feels more like an aestheticized and detached art project thing this way. Why?

Another distorted guitar loop comes up (though it might actually be something played "live"), and the synths bubble and hisssss, and I think: Steve Miller. This is not meant as an insult. It's that this track feels like a classic rock track, any classic rock track, only with the implied anarchy of certain aspects of the sound multiplied to unheard-of levels.

Arrrgh. Had to shut my window. Somebody's smoking outside and it's pissing off my sinuses. I seem to have a minor cold. You know, when I'm interrupted like that; I put the music on pause; when I give up trying to say something about a track, I still listen to the whole track anyway. I still want to be able to say: "Yeah, I listened to the whole damn thing. What of it?" I cannot abide by cheating.

"Floating Manhattan," a title near and dear to my heart. And the track sounds like the title. Wow. I do not think I am ready for this. It is significantly louder and denser than the last track. Or at least it implies very loud things. The track sounds like it should make the windows vibrate. When I was a kid, my brothers both were fond of very very loud music. Tommy was in a band that practiced in the basement, and Bobby had two turntables and a microphone in the room next door to mine. They would rattle windows. And this sounds like that, it sounds like superloud rocknoise fucking with the resonant frequencies of a suburban house. It evokes an enormity I can barely comprehend -- which is to say it is sublime. Oh, and he completely psyches me out with a moment of near-silence (it sounds like Buddhist mooing) at about the five minute mark. And after that, it gets even more excruciating still, with guitar-firework-feedback screeching and squelchpulses and hollow echoing howls. And it changes direction. A few shouts, presumably by MA himself. Sample noise. A little quieter, as if MA is trying to concentrate on individual details of the hellish skree he just produced. It ends with phantom electronic flares dubbing out into nothing.

"Hongkong Suite": only the best for Masami Akita. Ha ha. No, it's the name of some pop music standard, I think. Oh god, not the metal-on-metal crashing AGAIN! Oh no, wait, it's uh...uh...some bit of kitsch orchestral nonsense, and then a harsh loop. OK, familiar territory, I suppose. Guitar has epilectic fit while fluffy pink cherry blossom pop sometimes sashays by. Well, that's only a small part of it. I guess "Floating Manhattan" plum wore me out. MA had me and I just lost it. Or maybe it's because the last one had "Manhattan" and this one has "Hongkong" in their titles, and since I live in Manhttan it's just easier for me to impose all sorts of fantasies on the former track than the latter.

(link)