On Fri, 31 Dec 1999, Jamie Johnson wrote:
quoted 4 lines I've often heard talk of the Japanese noise assault that is Merzbow. Is it> I've often heard talk of the Japanese noise assault that is Merzbow. Is it
> worth looking into, if so, which album is a good starter. Just so you know,
> I've got a decent tolerance for noise (I like Lesser, Alec Empire, and
> Shizuo quite a bit).
I don't really subscribe to the "heard one Merzbow disc, heard 'em all"
theory, which is usually put forth by people who haven't taken the time to
check out the various flavors of Merzbow releases. Though I have to admit
there was a period in which the market was flooded with similar-sounding
junk.
For convenience's sake, there are mainly two different kind of Merzbow
discs out there- the junky-sounding loop stuff derived from applying
Deutsche Grammafon Avant Guard methods (c.f. the liner notes to Batztoutai
w/ MG) to Kurt Schwitters' worldview, and the blaring distorto-noise fests
which are more approachable as ever-shifting textural waves.
As a rule of thumb, the early material (mid 80s to about 1990) tends to
fall into the junkier phase, wherease the later stuff gets more amped up.
If I had to pick a handful of releases to sum things up, I'd probably go
for _Batztoutai w/ Memorial Gadgets_ (2CD on RRR, cheap and still
available) and _Ecobondage_ (CD reissued by Jim O' Rourke's
then-girlfriend, I think) for the early period and _Rainbow Electronics_
(CD on Alchemy- his first masterpiece of "I feel your pain because I'm
causing it to happen"), _Pulse Demon (CD on Relapse) and maybe _Flare Gun_
(out of print LP, but I have pretty fond memories of this one). There's
also a collaborative LP with SBOTHI (I think) which was pretty nifty. In
fact, there was a period of time in which a staggering number of mail
collaborations w/ Akita were being put out, but don't fool yourself into
thinking that they vary that much according to his collaborator.
There's also a bunch of odds and ends, including _Music for Bondage
Performance_ (CD on Extreme), which is more of a chilled-out ambient disc.
A lot of people seem to like this, but I suspect it's more because they
secretly think it "proves" that Akita is not a one-trick pony than an
indicator of relative quality. There's also a pretty amusing stab at
Factory-style new wave, documented on the cassette-only release _Aka Meme_
(V2 Archief, NL). Akita must've figured out that it was too confusing to
put these things out under the Merzbow franchise, because lately he's been
using his own name for these weird sojourns (as in the _Prosperity of
Vice_ CD and the really terrible 12" on Mego).
As a final note, Iannis Xenakis' _Legende d'Eer_ CD (Disques Montaigne)
has this really amazing aural rendition of his wartime experience of being
hit by a grenade that any Merzbow fan would do well to investigate.
Not too many audio experiences are hairier than that one.
-rob
ps- cheers to Masonna, whose vocal acrobatics sound like nothing more than
Henri Chopin being seared by arcs of electricity (c.f. Madame Anne
Sanglante...). Jeers to the Incapacitants, who can't even claw their way
into the cesspool of mediocrity that Hijokaiden has been stewing in for
almost a decade.
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