Ducks Battle Satan

Has anyone else noticed how the absolute arse has fallen out of the CD market? Stuff that I thought I’d never get the chance to own has become infinitely affordable. I won’t brag about the $14.00 copy of Green Wheels I tracked down last week (yet) but Merzbow’s back catalogue, which had been shockingly expensive has now come within reach.

Last year a reader tipped me off to a guy on Discogs who was offloading his Merzbow collection pretty cheaply. I really wanted Sha Mo 3000 and Vibractance (Adam – do you want to review that one?) but I also picked up Tentacle for shits and giggles. Tentacle is one of Merzbow’s laptop recordings and in many ways it has a lot in common with the uncompromising harshness of the mid-1990’s output like Oersted and Pulse Demon. Some  of the tracks are pretty short by Merzbow standards and for what is essentially a harsh noise record, pretty varied.

The two tracks that worked best for me are Stormy Tuesday and Stormy Monday. Stormy Tuesday is a style of noise that I can hear reflected in the work of Russell Haswell and is a track that reveals the level of control required to make great noise. The second Stormy track is the pick of the record. What starts out like the Kakadu field recordings of KK Null’s Fertile morphs into  pop Merzbow, speed metal Merzbow and all points in-between. It’s like the entirety of 1930 and Space Metalizer crammed into 26 minutes. If you find this in your travels pick it up. Another great Merzbow record. About a 7.5 on the harshness scale I reckon.

The beauty about writing about music and noise in particular is that my readers let me know of records I need to hear. This 2003 offering from Merzbow is one of those ones that often comes up in conversation and when I have read the Merzbow forums it became apparent that Sha Mo 300 is considered with some affection by Merzbow fans. After listening to this repeatedly over the past week I can understand why.

Sha Mo 3000 is one of two records that Merzbow has released through the Brazilian Essence music label (the other being Camouflage) and to be honest you won’t find two more diverse offerings by the same artists. If Camouflage is a trip back to the harsh, uncompromising days of the mid- 1990’s then Sha Mo 3000 is a continuation of his wickedly playful side.  Sha Mo 3000 is one of those great, fun Merzbow records where harsh noise meets beats and rhythm, where guitar psychedelia meets doom laden distortion and  mutated field recording death-disco makes an appearance. To give you an idea of just how diverse this sounds on the fourth track, the 22 minute Dreaming K-Dog, a cuckoo sings, an alarm clock starts ringing, chicken noises are looped, guitars that sound like they have been recorded backwards play  and electrical menace overlays the whole thing – and that is the first two minutes.

Sha Mo 3000 is a thoroughly accessible noise record. It all sounds so completely effortless but it is one of those terrific Merzbow records that you can play again and again and hear new things. If you like you Merzbow in an ear bleeding kind of way then you’ll need to track down something like Pulse Demon – Sha Mo 3000 is not the record you’re looking for. It is a record that explores all sides of Merzbow’s sound interests – psychedelia, harsh noise, percussive beats, drumming, field recordings and animal noise.  It is one of the easiest hopping on points for anyone thinking of exploring the world of Merzbow. On a harshness scale this is  somewhere down near 2 out of 10. Don’t listen to the Merzbow tragics who dismiss everything he’s released after 2000. This is one of his best.

When I first started listening to Merzbow I wondered whether there would be  a point where  I could differentiate between good Merzbow records and ones that were less than essential. I think I am probably beyond that point now and my ears are tuned in to an extent where a Merzbow either excites me, has some moments of greatness or is simply dull.  I wasn’t a fan of his drumming records and I think that sentiment goes for a lot of noise nerds out there.  The trick when writing about Merzbow is to try and figure out why a record like SCSI Duck is an exciting record even though many of the sound forms are instantly recognisable.  I gotta tell you I think I got nothing sensible. But for what it’s worth there is some great noise textures in this record, the rate of change in the scree, blast and hiss are all good, there is even some quasi-industrial goodness at times but to borrow from some outdated slang I think on this record Merzbow “got his shit tight”. This is a record you rarely see being written about and I think that is a shame. It’s not in my top five Merzbow records but it is definitely in my Top 15. It also proves that those Merzbow purists who reckon everything he did post 2000 is crap are wrong – very, very wrong. There seems to be a massive amount of these being sold at the moment cheap on ebay and discogs. I advise you to pick on up.

Before I get too my own thoughts on Merzbient  – this is how Solielmoon explain where this comes from.

“Merzbient” is a twelve CD collection of Merzbow’s previously unreleased ambient recordings. The music was recorded in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, at a time when Masamik Akita (Merzbow) was becoming famous for his live performances, which featured some of the harshest sounds ever heard. The records he released mirrored these peformances, and helped establish his reputation as the prime mover in the Japanese noise scene. The electronics he used for his recordings were the same ones he used for live shows. Out of necessity he toured with gear that was small, simple and portable. But all the while he was secretly recording quieter, more atmospheric music, and using a wide variety of acoustic instruments including an impractical monstrosity he describes as a “big handmade junk instrument made from a metal box with piano wires”, which he played with a violin bow. He made hours and hours of recordings, but kept them private and never released them, until they were eventually set aside and forgotten. He recently rediscovered the multi-track mastertapes in a box and remastered them for release on CD.

As  you trawl the interwebs you might notice that there is a defined sense of elitism when it comes to Merzbow. Have a look at some of the stuff on Lastfm for instance. There are the people who question Merzbow’s relevance, the “I don’t listen to anything after 2000/1998/1994 (take your pick) crowds, the analogue purists, the anything softer than Verenology is crap mob, the Masonna are better club. The absolutism of many of these views is something that surprises me. I’ve said it before but if you are undertaking a journey in to the world of noise, or Merzbow specifically, then that journey is going to be a very private one. You are going to hear things in the sound that no one else will. Your relationship with it will always be unique to everyone elses. So when I review Merzbow the only things that are going to be relevant to anyone else is a general overview of the sound. In the past I’ve relied on a definition of harshness, the presence or absence of recognisable forms and whether it has a beat, the style (big-beat, industrial, pure noise). Four years ago I wrote about my experience with Merzbear, a decidedly easy hopping on point for anyone new to Merzbow or noise, then onto Merzzow, Amlux, Tauromachine and the one that really blew me away 1930. Last year I was inspired by a reader in New York to explore the really harsh stuff of the mid-1990’s and realised I didn’t need to hang on to those recognisable forms anymore.

The sound on Merzbient covers a period from from 1988 to 1990 and in a noise sense covers a huge amount of ground. Before we got too much further, the first thing I wrestled with when hearing this was my definition of ambient. I’ve always defined it in the context of Eno’s Music for Airports. If you do the same then Merzbient is sure as shit not ambient. This is Merzbow after all, the King of Noise and Merzbient is a decidedly noisy affair. Even when the tracks are flooded with light such as the music on Disc 1 there is a distinct ominous vibe. As I trawl through each of the discs I’ve been struck with how some of Merzbient  sounds like that creeping dread that you might hear on quieter Wolf Eyes tracks. In fact, there is a real sense on some of these discs of the rust-belt decay of the Michigan noise scene. I could pick out bits and pieces of the tracks and tell you that this bit sounds a little like this record or that. I could tell you on Disc 2 that the use of sample animal recordings made me think of Nurse With Wound before some decidedly No-Neck Blues Band style acoustic guitar and drum vibe shattered that illusion – but to pick out all the bits that worked for me over these 12 discs would require me starting a separate blog that I would suspect would defeat the purpose of why I started this blog in the first place by referencing the obscure with even more obscure comparisons.

I encourage anyone with a Merzbow interest to buy this. I know that many of you have got it already and I’d love to hear your thoughts about  it in the comments (or send me an email ducksbattlesatan@gmail.com). I think that in the scheme of noise, Merzbient is, dare I say it, extremely important. When the next scholar writes on noise I think that Merzbient will be considered one of it’s seminal works.

This is one of my favourite Merzbow records – truly incredible. An absolute must for Merzbow fans.  A reader of this blog, Adam from Sydney, kindly agreed to write his thoughts on it. Cheers Adam.

This is one of the more unusual Merzbow albums. It’s unusual mainly because of the first track, clocking in at 25 and a half minutes. It starts out with some pretty mean deep-end rumbling, a la Zbigniew Karkowski (with whom Akita has made a couple collaborative albums as MAZK). Soon afterwards a distinctive drum rhythm kicks in and it will go on through the entire track.  However, this is not the sampled jazz or rock drumming (as heard on Aqua Necromancer, for example) or Akita’s own drumming like on the 13 Japanese Birds series; it’s rather “tribal”. I’m not sure if he’s used similar drumming on other albums (from what I’ve heard, Dust of Dreams might be somewhat similar). Anyway, the piece starts building up slowly, more sound events start happening but the freeform noise chaos so characteristic of most Merzbow never really sets in. Mind you, the track is still a beast: at one point a sound is added that is not too dissimilar to what you’d expect giant horns to sound like (I was reminded of the Yoshi Wada album “Earth Horns with Electronic Drone” on which a couple “homemade pipehorns”  are played, with even the shortest one being at least 5 meters long). Listening to it I was trying to figure out what the track could be likened to most and I came up with this: it sounds like an unstoppable factory with all its noises compressed into a rhythm that beats the shit out of you (with a certain amount of non-rhythmic noise matter present at the same time), and this factory happens to be marching to the harsh sounds of giant horns. I know this makes no sense so in case you’re still wondering, I’ll just say this: it’s intense. Very intense.  Now with Merzbow, that’s usually an understatement, but this time it’s intense in a different, much more controlled way. Then comes the second track (all track titles are in Japanese (although in Latin letters) so I won’t bother inserting them) which starts with Akita playing the acoustic guitar like a madman. This might or might not be looped but quickly becomes a texture upon which a grinding noise loop is laid. Basically the whole track is looped and quite hypnotic.  My favourite part comes around the 12^th minute mark where for a short while everything stops, leaving  an awesome electronic loop – and it’s not even distorted.  This part returns a couple minutes later and the piece ends with the same acoustic part it started with. The third and final track begins with the kind of synthesized bird chirping/electronic sounds mixture that is also the starting theme of the last track on the Puroland album. Then it’s loop territory again: this time the loop has a bit of an industrial flavour. It continues basically throughout the whole song which is the shortest on the album, almost 12 minutes. It’s the track most typical of Merzbow on the album, although the loop means there’s a strict structure.

Yoshinotsune is very rhythmic (but not at all in a way the Merz-series on Important Records is) and much more structured than most Merzbow albums. There are much less high frequency abstract noise freakouts too (for me this sound has become the “trademark” Merzbow sound). It shows (especially the first track) a fairly different and very rewarding side of Merzbow. But – and this is probably crystal clear anyway – it will still test your speakers and the endurance of anyone nearby who’s unfortunate enough not to like noise music.