In the beginning, the Japanese avant-rockers Nisennenmondai made no secret of their influences. Tracks on 2004's Neji EP bore titles like "Pop Group," "This Heat," and "Sonic Youth," and for good reason. On guitar, drums, and bass, the trio whipped up a ferocious, muscular racket scarred with pockets of deep silence—a post-punk template shot through with the ghosts of dub and free noise.
Over the years, they've moved away from the prickly aggression of their early records and toward a sleeker, more measured form, one equally informed by Krautrock's steady burble and minimal techno's crosshatched textures. It's as if they started out brandishing a misshapen lump of scrap metal and have proceeded to hammer it out into a long, linear shape, perfectly proportioned. And I do mean long: Their tracks routinely run to 10 or 12 or 14 minutes, and they increasingly feel less like individual songs than outtakes of a single continuum. After touring their 2013 album N, they decided that the material's metronomic clatter had evolved enough that it merited a re-recording for a new release, N', in which it's not so much the songs that have changed as the air and the light around them. In its rigor and regularity, all of the trio's work this decade sounds like a tribute to Agnes Martin's grid drawings. It's the tiny variations within their repeated structures where the crucial differences happen, where life dwells. Nisennenmondai might be the world's most disciplined jam band.
Their new album, #N/A, proceeds directly from their last two. Its opening track, "#1," might as well be a continuation of N and N''s respective openers, "A" and "A'." It sounds like a teletype in a hurricane. But they're also stretching out and exploring new territory here. Where "#1" and "#5" are quickstepping as ever—somewhere near 150 BPM, a tempo that requires gargantuan feats of concentration and muscle control to rein in their tightly interlocking rhythms when they play live—they slow down slightly on "#2." At under four minutes long, "#3" is both one of the shortest songs they've done in ages and also the one that comes closest to approximating actual techno, with undulating drones that sound uncannily like Richie Hawtin and Steve Bug's ultra-minimal anthem "Low Blow," from 2002.
But there is an important shift on the new record: the addition of On-U Sound's Adrian Sherwood, the British producer and dub wizard, whose mixing-desk manipulations blow the trio's sound wide open, from two dimensions into three or four. His addition helps them shift even further from the associations that usually cling to the typical rock-trio lineup—aside from Sayaka Himeno's diamond-tipped hi-hats, nothing here sounds like what it actually is. Masako Takada's guitar swerves between hollow drones and whippoorwilling trills and a porous, soft-hard spray like a sandblaster full of nail clippings. Yuri Zaikawa's bass is either pure rhythm or pure shadow. Together, they all sound like exploding clockworks, and even more so when Sherwood lassoes individual sounds and whips them to and fro.
Against the trio's unflinching sense of discipline, he represents something closer to chaos; to their ceaseless repetition he brings unpredictability. In "#5," gunshots ring out, and so does a typewriter bell; it's unclear what those sounds really are, or where they may have come from. Summoned or not, through the magic of dub, they simply appear. Sherwood's manipulations remain relatively restrained on the five studio cuts, but on two live tracks, he really goes to town, twisting delay knobs and reeling off serpentine licks that magnify the aberrations of the trio's straight-ahead groove. There may be no artist more committed to the line as a creative medium than Nisennenmondai; projected through Sherwood's spacetime-distorting lens, their vision of infinity becomes all the more engrossing.
