OH CHRIST! SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD! THIS IS THE MOST EXCRUCIATINGLY TREMENDOUSLY CLANGROUS DISASTER PSYCHO-INFERNO SINCE THE GULF WAR AND A YOUNG NIC CAGE! This is what a Merzbow review circa the early 90s would have looked like. I remember briskly walking down the streets in the crisp air, seeing the idle Merzbow-listeners in the cafes. There was an ineffable apprehension in the air. New Merzbow reviews go like this: "We heard this all a hundred times back in the 90s. It's tedious boringcore, alternating between trivial and insufferable." I saw a show where Merzbow played between Madlib and Sleater-Kinney sets, and kids were sitting on the floor chatting, patiently waiting, painting their nails. I sympathize with the position, but I can't adopt it.
Trey Parker once said the end of reality TV would only come when they started airing baby-fucking shows. Once that show starts production, it will be viewers' fault, not the baby-fucker's. Merzbow is the aural baby-fucker. Wherever your ideology lies on the experimental scale, and whatever your religious affiliation, music cannot get much more extreme than this. Maybe John Cage's 4'33", and that's so far to the limit, it's probably cheating. This is the edge of music, of sound in general.
And now, here we are, confronted by the junction of a new album and the re-release of an incomparable classic. It's a moment for reflection and memorialization, and respect for the battleaxes that have been ensconced in our brains. In a lot of circles, 1996's Pulse Demon was one of the verifiable foundations of noise, the final proof that the pythonic wall of sound was scalable. This is a gross overstatement, of course, as journals from the Sixth Century also indicate the presence of noise, but it's not an entirely deceitful one. It came after a string of near-apocalyptic releases that were far more severe and atrophic, but also entertaining, heterogeneous, energizing, malleable.
Pulse Demon is simply pure sound, viciously unadulterated static. The earlier releases stimulated the imagination; Pulse Demon decimates it. It also has a bit of a beat that would be further dismantled in the succeeding years. Pulse Demon is Meet the Beatles, where you start to understand Masami Akita's appeal before the relentless experimentalism period. And, in this sense, the record is probably one of the most archetypal Merzbow albums, the one most resolutely and incorrigibly reluctant to dilute itself with free jazz, industrial, world, or musique concrete.
"Woodpecker No.1" is a static abscess that at first overtakes some pathetic techno, and rises to a steaming squalor that subsumes the rest of the track. "Spiral Blast" performs exactly what the title promises, although the "blast" part seems to be the focus, instigating one of the most demented howls on record, like the squeal from the JBs' "The Grunt" maximized to its most trembling, terrifying, cumbersome capacity. The second half is even better. The last half of the half-hour-long "Worms Plastic Earthbound" is a brutally drunken subterranean gunfight. All in all, seventy minutes that feel like driving an 18-wheeler made out of concrete into a remedial course on nuclear winter. And there aren't even overdubs! Essential. Unimpeachable. And the packaging by itself is already more valuable than some people's lives.
In these leadenly gray days, everything from Black Dice to Fennesz is being played on the campus radio and it's easy to lose sight of what was truly revolutionary. And yet, even compared to the most recent Merzbow releases, Pulse Demon will still slaughter innocent orphans in a fraction of a second. Case in point: Animal Magnetism, one of the more approachable recent Merzbow releases. I can easily imagine someone enjoying this album who doesn't even feign to enjoy masochism. On the titular track, the mix is muddled, there are tinny beats in the surroundings, and the slow rise of a pseudo-melody. There are still static, androids, and bondage, of course, but this is definitely a step closer to getting signed to Astralwerks.
"Quiet Men" is a light, vivacious cartoon, making the sound Warner Bros. animals make when they spin around. The first half of the album feels rather fluid. Whereas startling jaggedness is to be expected on a Merzbow album, on Animal Magnetism, there's a continuity that observes evolution and decay. Unfortunately, it's also less distinctive. "Super Sheep" tries to get some propulsion going, but the bassline is so immediately familiar to the causal Alec Empire fan, it makes the distortion feel like a deleterious contrivance Akita felt compelled to include at the last minute.
"A Ptarmigan" is the most interesting track, if not particularly exemplary. In twenty minutes, it's a parade in one section, a turgid dirge in the next. "Pier 39" is an ambient, scraping anomaly that wouldn't be too out of place on a Boards of Canada album. While it's perhaps the best recent Merzbow CD for newcomers, it's not a keystone in his canon. Still, it's not nearly worthy of the horrendous dullness ascribed to it in the media in its first days of release. And, even if it's not his best, it'll still be hilarious when all our dads get it thinking it's that old album by The Scorpions. Maybe then Merzbow will finally be able to piss someone off.
