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Japanese noise deity Merzbow has hooked up with the charmingly named low-end rockers Porn (who were previously charmingly known as the Men of Porn...) to create twelve tracks of what is basically a cross between a broken radio detuned to Stockhausen FM and that horrible sound they use to scare hedgehogs, with not much variation in between.
'Don’t call it music if it offends you' is the tag line for LPs like this. Since musicians ran out of fresh chord combinations a couple of hundred years ago, to be truly original these days it seems the very fabric of sound has to be torn apart, spat on, incinerated, and put back together like a second hand jigsaw from Oxfam, covered in unfamiliar stains and with most of the important bits missing.
Although currents of music do occasionally swirl through this sea of noise, the odd drum beat or swampy, juddering guitar riff, they're largely obscured by the tumbling waterfalls of broken glass, balls of maggots and boiling cauldrons of blood, gristle and fingerless fingernails doing battle inside your sound system. If you ever want to kill someone, but don't fancy the whole ball n' chain scene, just lock them in a room with a carving knife and this album playing at full blast. It’ll look just like suicide, but we'll know who's really to blame. Merzbow, that's who.
Known to his friends, if he has any, as Masami Akita, Merzbow isn't just your average avant-garde post-modernist noise producing record label owning Joe. According to that highly reliable journalist's tool Wikipedia he has also been the editor of several Japanese magazines, has written a few books and enjoys contributing articles about fetish culture and S&M. Wow.
The classic criticism of his genre is that it contributes to the dehumanisation of music, but this is a very human record: all blind confusion, muffled screams and unthinking violence. When listening to it, it’s worth bearing in mind that after seeing the twin towers collapse in on themselves in a maelstrom of ash and melted steel on September 11, 2001 Stockhausen publicly declared it to be the greatest artistic statement of the century.
The point is that there can be beauty in the most horrific things, be it the flaming death of thousands or the arterial gush of a slit throat, the detonation of an atom bomb or the animal caterwauling of a suckling infant having its tiny hands nailed to the floor. This is a real Auschwitz of an album. Not exactly the sort of thing you'd stick on to do the washing up to though.
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That's a fairly tasteless line.
i wants it
yus
it's a disgusting thing to say
And I think you've misunderstood Stockhausen, I very much doubt that his definition of art would include a word like 'beauty'.
Wheather beauty or art can emerge from human suffering is a huge moral concern for artists, Adorno going as far as saying "To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric". Especially considering basically all art is made in pursuit of money and/or recognition, I partly agree with him that it is morally recomprehensible to profit by the misery of others. Similarly so to chuck around words like this just to add a bit of colour to a review.
Please do let us know what beauty you find in "a suckling infant having its tiny hands nailed to the floor".
well that was a brave stab at a review
and an enjoyable read, think merzbow is the coldplay of the noise scene, he's been around so long that he has become synonimous with horrible noise, and if he's eeking a living from over-inquisitive radiohead fans buying on impulse then fair play to him! Can you actually enjoy the music though...?
I'm in a curious vantage point as i was asked to do a noise set for a friend's show the other day, and I'm ashamed to admit that after weeks of cunjouring up hideous sheets of screeching metal noise and sub bass vomiting via the laptop, on the night I bailed and did a two song set and some toned down sub bass noise for a few minutes, pathetic!
Amy Blue has done two "noise" records here, enjoy...:
http://www.last.fm/label/The+World+is+Fucked+Recordings
who said
"there can be no poetry after auschwitz? WH Auden? I thought this was a reference to that...
that article started out good,
and got worse and worse untill you metioned a baby getting it's hands nailed to the floor
wtf man?
wtf
Adorno (see above)
Auden wrote a lot of poetry after Auschwitz
I've been thinking about this all day
and I'm amazed that this review, and that line in particular, got past the sub editing process. The references to Stockhausen are facile in the extreme and like I said above, the Auschwitz line is beyond tasteless, especially in the context of this review. I could write a fucking thesis on it, but you don't go comparing a fucking noise record to the holocaust, and if you do then at least try to justify it. I'd go as far as to say this is the worst review of a noise record I've ever read; it fails on just about every single level.
really
i don't how this review got posted. its pretty darn awful. i think only_shallow sums it up pretty well.
The quiet, polite vegan...
I had the pleasure of playing with Merzbow earlier this year as part of a dirty electronics ensemble. I'm loving this new work... the contrasts between the music and his persona are really something.
Hearing it live should come with a health warning.
Wait
this is a review of a *record*??
Coulda fooled me, I thought it was a few vague thoughts about a genre unfamiliar to the writer.
However, only_shallow, I must ask (out of idle curiosity) how you feel about being named after a band who were/are infamous for a live show known as "the holocaust"..?
Oh, wait again
maybe it was "the apocalypse". As you were.
...
I didn't put a huge amount of thought into my username; think I was listening to the track when I registered.
Having said that, I wasn't aware of the holocaust reference...what's the story behind it? My initial reaction is that I'm not particularly comfortable with it if, as I assume, it's just a throwaway reference to the volume of their live shows, but I'd like to hear the reasoning before I make any decision.
yeah but like
the holocaust didn't actually happen did it
i'd say
it is a good review considering it made you all talk about it.
to be picky
the word holocaust means a completely burnt offering to a god, so if MBV saw this as a fitting metaphorical title for their crazy purgy noisey mayhem that seems sort of understandable and you could argue they weren't trivialising or profitting from anyone's suffering, but I don't know really know much about the band and it's true that the word holocaust means only one thing to most people.
Yeah,
I wasn't saying "YOU have a username that is tenuously linked to a throwaway reference to millions of deaths, therefore how can you judge someone else using one", I was just wondering if you thought MBV had justified it. And maybe I was being a bit facetious as well.
But yeah, think it was just to do with their volume - in particular, the volume of a specific ear-bleeding part of their set - and I couldn't tell you whether it was a name they adopted or just one that was slapped on 'em. And it may not have been that name anyway (see above). Ah, I should stop rambling and get me dinner...
it was not millions
only a few thousand
don't believe the lies of the international zionist conspiracy
more gyspies died, but they do not have their own nation, why?
a review that compels people to talk about how bad it is is not a good review
strange logic there
Ah cool
although I'm fairly sure the term holocaust has probably been used in reference to their live show. Which is equally shitty really.
big deal- Slayer wrote Agel of Death, going into gory details
about Nazi atrocitiets, Seth Putnam with Anal Cunt's written several songs with names like "' Ha Ha Holocaust'. A single line in a music review is hardly any worse.
*Angel
--
i think
you all have too much spare time in your lives. Please find a HoBBy
I would like
to apologise to everybody for this review
it's fucking awful
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