Aural Aggravation

Southern Lord – 4^th December 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

Sunn O))). The band who have essentially launched doom / drone into a whole new domain and transformed a microniche into something that’s as immense as the sound they create. It’s utterly perverse. There should be about fifteen people digging this band, not because they’re not unspeakably intense and remarkable in every way, but because, well, they’re simply not accessible. But these are dark times, in every respect. Musically, lamecore rap / r’n’b continue to dominate the mainstream, while an endless procession of limp-dicked tattoo-sporting clones rules the world of the ‘alternative’ and ‘rock’ scenes. Outside music, art and literature has been diluted to the lowest common denominator, and in the realms beyond that, the world is at war and the rich get richer while the poor slowly sink. None of this feels like progress. This is the hour for a band like Sunn O))), and so it is that they are the chosen band to lead the way through the darkness of the modern world, and back to the caves which offer a safe haven in the woods from the inanity of the 21^st century.

Sunn O))) evoke deep, primal sensations while simultaneously conjuring reflections of the shadows which currently cover the earth. But what of their progress? There’s no question that Monoliths and Dimensions was something of a watershed, and marked a huge leap in their evolution – something akin to shedding gills having developed lungs. It’s hard to credit that Monoliths was a full six years ago now, although the band and their members have hardy been resting on their laurels, what with their multitudinous other projects. And then of course, there was Soused, their collaboration with Scott Walker, an album that encapsulated the growling, low-end doom drone sound that’s synonymous with Sunn O))), while also demonstrating a remarkable degree of subtlety and restraint.

Casting reflections back to the last Sunn O))) album proper, Monoliths and Dimensions, an album consisting of but four tracks, felt like a leviathan work at the time. That still stands, and their latest offering certainly doesn’t undermine any of their previous work. And nor does it deviate too drastically from it. It’s certainly no criticism to observe that the band’s output is centred around variations on a sonic theme. Would anyone really want Sunn O))) to release an alum of rap covers, or to diversify into punk pop? Yes, that is a rhetorical question. Sunn O))) are undeniably the leading exponents of heavy, droning doom, and in the field they’ve laid out for themselves to harvest at will, Kannon excels.

Kannon contains only three tracks, simply numbered I, II, and III. Its running time is a little over half an hour. All things considered, it’s pretty concise, and while the band’s eternal debt to early Earth (in particular the pivotal Earth 2) is abundantly evident once again, the album’s comparative brevity is indicative of a band with a shifting focus and a determination to evolve, albeit at a craw.

‘Kannon I’ is a deliberate, trudging piece that builds through wraiths of sculpted feedback. Through the sonic fog, guttural snarls, wordless and inchoate, and resembling the growls of the zombies in The Walking Dead cough and splutter. Rising from the lung-shaking drone are layers of sound, soaring textures that straddle ambience and shoegaze. To dismiss Sunn O))) as merely priveyors of grinding, bottom end dirges is quite simply wrong.

‘Kannon II’ slows the pace to less than a crawl: the harmonics which emanate from the alternating low-end powerchords and whorls of feedback stream from the speakers at barely a single beat per minute. Monastic chants rise ominously as if we’re party to an occult ceremony celebrating the end of days. For all I know, we perhaps are. It culminates in a deep, rumbling explosion, which quite conceivably sounds the way a distant planetary body collapsing in space as captured by an orbital probe may sound. And my terror deepens.

‘Kannon III’, clocking in at just over eleven minutes, is the most overtly doom-metal. The monastic vocals give way to an anguished howl of ruined vocal chords, a black metal burial. Yet, at the same time, it soars, conjuring ideas of a new, bright future arising from the wreckage strewn by the obliterative maelstrom of downtuned guitars. Simultaneously ruinous and redemptive, the vocals rise from the abyss… but to where?

Kannon is no lazy rehash of all Sunn O))) have done before. Of course it’s a brutal, dark celebration of the dark side, dominated by shredding power chords of tectonic force. And of course it’s theatrical, preposterous in its scale. It’s a Sunn O))) album, after all, and anything less than megalithic would be an immense disappointment. Kannon doesn’t disappoint on any level. Its scale is practically unfathomable, its scope and ambition virtually unparalleled. Quite simply, it’s a monster, just as anyone familiar with the band knew it would be. Utterly magnificent.

https://sunn.southernlord.com/

Monotype Records – monoLP017

Christopher Nosnibor

The relationship between nostalgia and kitsch is a strange and complex one, although it would be a justified premise that there is an element of synonymy. Every generation is nostalgic for its own bygone age, the appreciation of the less appealing aspects of that age only developing later. Not for nothing are phrases like ‘so bad it’s good’ commonplace: people know something is little short of tat, and it was tat at the time, but the past offers a comfort – or, moreover, an evocation of comfort – absent from the present, in which the future – uncertain, scary – looms large. Safer to retreat to the past, even the detritus of the past – than confront the future, in which the only absolute certainties are ageing and death. There is, of course, another almost predetermined certainty in the future as we now see it: the older we get, the further out of touch we will become, and just as the children of the 80s and 90s spent their youth showing their parents how to use remote controls and computers, so their children will in turn show them how to operate the latest household technologies. The future, stretching out, is a picture of an ever-increasing disconnection the now. And so, the past offers comfort, and familiarity, or at least the illusion thereof.

In light of the way we’ve adapt to existing in the postmodern world, and in context of the immense weight of verbiage devoted to extrapolating the theory and evolution of our present state, culturally and socially, it may be banal to remark that modern technologies have made it possible for today’s younger generations to develop an appreciation of the eras that predate their own. Nevertheless, it’s an important part of the context for the nostalgia boom of the 21^st century. Collectively, we love nostalgia, because it calls to mind different, safer, simpler times – even if this in itself is a misrepresentation, symptomatic of the way history becomes revised through misremembrance. But what happens when the accepted versions of history are torn free of the mores of familiarity? For a start, we see those nostalgic features afresh, with new eyes.

Here, Krojc and Fischerle take the type of public service broadcasts and information recordings which have become popular sources of plunder for samplists in recent years (Public Service Broadcasting have forged a career from repurposing such material) and render them in a fashion which is antithetical to the vogueish nostalgia we’ve become accustomed to.

John, Betty and Stella attacks the notion that the past offers comfort, and certainly does not confirm to the kitsch recycling of late postmodernism. Whereas Public Service Broadcasting present their works in a knowing, overtly tongue in cheek and irritatingly faux-artsy manner, selecting source material that evokes a quaintness ideal for repurposing as nostalgia – ready-made nostalgia, with the bonus of inbuilt kitsch – Krojc and Fischerle render less obvious source material all the more unsettling by placing it against a difficult musical backdrop.

Moreover, Krojc and Fischerle don’t lift the material, but engage with it, taking it as a starting point and developing it. All is not as it seems: John, Betty and Stella is, in fact, a radio drama based on vintage tapes for learning English. The dialogue, such as it is, originates from textoob role plays from old vinyl. As such, they reconfigure the material, manipulating it, reshaping it, brutalising it. Cut up, sliced, spliced and collaged against howling solar winds, blasts of static, grumbling industrial noise and bloopy analogue electro weirdness , the effect is immediately jarring, disturbing even.

John, Betty and Stella shares a lineage with William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, not least of all his audio works from the late 1950s and early 1960s. While not nearly as extreme as the material which featured on, for example, the Nothing Here Now But the Recordings album, the way in which Burroughs strove to ‘free’ words from the constraints of linguistic pre-programming bears an obvious parallel to Krojc and Fischerle’s work here.

The segment on ‘Modern art’ in ‘Figure Behind You’ features throbbing synthesised pulsations and crackling glitchtronica, which provide a dissonant backdrop to a sequence of surreal exchanges, which in turn typify the contents of the album as a whole: “What is this this? A tree?” “No, a man.” “A Man? Where are his legs?” It’s bizarre, and also somewhat comedic, and it’s the fact John, Betty and Stella offers a range of moods that makes it such an engaging listen. Elsewhere, exchanges between the characters of John and Stella take on unsettling aspects: “Stella, wait. Where are you going?” ‘Don’t stop me, John. Let me go!” This tense-sounding exchange takes place eastern-influenced drones snake over distorted rhythms, half exotic, half ominous.

At its best, surrealism has always had the capacity to provoke a sense of the unheimlich, and just as Freud suggested that it was psychologically more difficult to process something familiar, but different, incongruous, than something overtly mysterious or different, so John, Betty and Stella sees Krojc and Fischerle forge a work which closely resembles accessible, mass-market friendly commercial nostalgia, but isn’t it. In fact, it isn’t quite like anything else – and that’s by far the duo’s greatest achievement.

Krojc / Fischerle – John, Betty and Stella Online

Have you ever been attacked? In a fight? I mean properly pounded, battered so hard you hurt all over, body and mind? I have to admit that I haven’t, although I have been socked a few times and once fell while descending a mountain and cracked a couple of ribs, which left me in such agony that even breathing was difficult for almost six weeks. Listening to NV brings all that pain back: every bar feels like a punch to the abdomen, a boot to the ribs. This ain’t listening pleasure: it hurts. But really, what else did you expect from a collaborative effort from two such nihilistic noisemakers?

The context and sonic template is also worth noting: according to the press release, this meeting of deranged minds began in late 2011 with one sole purpose in mind – to capture, digest and regurgitate Godflesh’s 1989 Streetcleaner into a conceptualised nightmare, with Dragged Into Sunlight commenting, “The level of detail in a recording of this nature is inexplicable. Every note lobotomised, remixed and overexposed, exorcising total aural madness.”

That Broadrick himself contributed to the album’s production not only represents a seal of approval, but an indication of the ferocious sonic brutality LV unleashes.

Unsurpringly, then, NV is as nasty as it comes: an album that’s, savage, raw, relentless. It’s not a split release, but a true collaboration, which cements and them amplifies the parts to forge something even greater and more punishing than the sum. Five tracks, all over the five minute mark and all a squalling mesh of violent noise with thunderous drums at 180bpm. Extraneous noise rumbles and squalls and the low and high end respectively, adding mess and noise and tension to the thunderous abrasion to the songs – as if they need further layers of pain and brain torment adding to the dense guitars that scorch like a forest fire.

Sit back and prepare to be very uncomfortable indeed. You’re almost definitely going to hurt afterwards.

Dragged Into Sunlight Online

Mini50 Records – 6th November 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m by no means the first to declaim that we’re now in the post-everything era. It can’t simply be that everything has been done, and done to exhaustion, although it’s beginning to feel very much like this is the case. That this is a sentiment which dominates our times may well be a significant factor in the ever-expanding nostalgia trade. Culturally, we’re done with kitsch and the current batch of hipsters, many of whom weren’t even out of shorts when the hipster thing exploded the best part of a decade ago now represent the post-irony generation.

The Silence Set is a collaboration with a certain pedigree: consisting of Gothenburg based musicians and composers Dag Rosenqvist (formerly Jasper TX and also known for his From the Mouth of the Sun project with Aaron Martin), and Johan G Winther, who made a name for himself with angular math rock outfit Scraps of Tape and his previous solo effort as Tsukimono.

With Teeth Out, The Silence Set achieve three things: in the most contemporary of fashion, they raw on myriad elements to forge an amalgamative sound that one may best describe as post-folk. It also so happens the songwriting is divine, conjuring ethereal dreamscapes that drape unpretentious acoustic arrangements in layers of misty synths, and in doing so create something new – something that hasn’t been done before, not quite like this. They may call to mind the likes of The Album Leaf, Efterklang, Mice Parade, Múm and Sufjan Stevens, but The Silence Set are indeed, a beautiful and unique snowflake in the blizzard of noise that s the media, the Internet, the word. Thirdly, they effectively imbue their delicate songs with a sincere emotional depth that simply cannot be fabricated or forced, and in doing so, they’ve created a work that’s timeless.

The vocal treatment on ‘Mirrored In’ is disorienting and penetrating, a soft piano ballad transformed into a weirdly dislocated piece that is the sonic evocation of the uncanny, as chimes and extraneous noises interfere with the obvious and accessible flow.

‘Deliverance’ somehow transitions from an easygoing banjo-based folk song to a tidal wave of noise and chimes that tears at the air and reshapes the atmosphere. ‘Needles’ is a simple, atmospheric piano piece, but once again ambient sounds and interferences alter the texture and the feel of things, reminding us that life is not perfect, there are no perfect moments any more, only near-perfect moments with disturbances. A best slowly builds in the distance, and synths and brass swell to an uplifting crescendo, while leading the track further from post-folk towards expansive electronica.

It’s the ability of The Silence Set to make these transitions, and so move between forms in such a fluid fashion, that makes Teeth Out such an engaging work. It’s a magnificent album, that isn’t any one thing beyond its own undefined boundaries. This is music. Great music, that strokes the soul and both soothes and stimulates the senses.

The Silence Set – Teeth Out On-Line

Neurot Recordings – 23rd October 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

Over a thunderous beat that’s tribal in tone but industrial disco in tempo, the first chord sounds out like the blast of a foghorn. And so begins the latest offering from Corrections House. Scott Kelly’s supergroup side-project, which sees him working in collaboration with Sanford Parker (Minsk), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Seward Fairbury and Eyehategod’s Mike IX Williams which debuted with 2013’s Last City Zero marks a significant departure from Neurosis – and each of the other members’ main projects, for that matter.

If Last City Zero was about amalgamating the parts and throwing in an industrial twist and a dash of experimentalism, Know How To Carry A Whip goes all out on the industrial front, with the result being something that’s mechanised, brutal and exploding with rage.

It’s a squalling mess of serrated metallic guitars grinding over pulverising industrial beats which clatter and clang relentlessly. Guitars are set to stun while thunderous percussion reminiscent of early Test Department thrown in a blender with RevCo’s Beers, Steers & Queers provides a dense and oppressive sonic backdrop. The postapocalyptic doom trudge of ‘Superglued Tooth’ is dark and sludgy: a spoken (shouted) word narrative that depicts dark and disturbing scenes as it trawls through the guts of hell amidst whirring machinery and guitar annihilation. It’s more Controlled Bleeding than it is Nine Inch Nails.

The sonic density corresponds with the emotional intensity, the metallic guitars melded tight against the mechanised skeleton of the rhythm section. In fact, it’s the thumping, overdriven beats that dominate the mix, the overloading sound accentuating the abrasive tone that defies the album. The lyrics aren’t always easy to pick out but the violently nihilistic sentiments are unmistakable.

In context, ‘Visions Divide’ a dark folk shanty of sorts, seems incongruous, but it by no means provides the respite an acoustic track may otherwise offer.

‘Hall of Cost’ is a brutal beast that comes on like KMFDM meets Ministry at their most savage, while the industrial goth of ‘When Push Comes to Shank’ drags the listener into a dark corner and kicks the living shit out of their psyche, while the doom-laden scrape of ‘Burn the Witness’ is a towering monument to pain and anguish.

Know How to Carry A Whip is a furious nihilistic assault. It’s ugly, painful, remorseless. Just the way it should be. It’s the soundtrack to existence, fucked-up, punishing, hate-filled, sleepless. The burn of self-loathing and bloody revenge. Harsh and unforgiving, an album that crackles with electric energy, it shows that Corrections House don’t only know how to carry a whip, but that they now how to crack it, too.

Corrections House Online

Young God Records – YG2015 – 1^st October 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

Before my copy even arrived, this limited, hand-numbered website-only fundraiser CD for the next Swans studio album – the last in their current incarnation had sold out. So why review it? Because. In case you’re in doubt, this is no press lig. This isn’t a special favour. It’s a piece I feel compelled to write.

Swans are a band whose ‘post-reformation’ works have divided fans more than critics, yet have seen their fan-base expand in a way they never saw during the entirety of their initial 15-year incarnation.

The Gate is a two-disc effort that captures Swans on their last tour, and as such, combines tracks from To Be Kind in post-release evolution, and the genesis and early development of material that will likely appear on their upcoming final album, wrapped up with some basic demos for said album. As such, it’s a pause for reflection, while also a preliminary insight into what’s to come; it certainly doesn’t feel like some kind of stop-gap filler. Then, of course, there’s the fact that they have – or, specifically Michael Gira has – gone to great lengths to produce a work of not only exceptional audio quality, but which is housed in the now-customary hand-made and decorated sleeves, signed and individually numbered. Fundraiser it may be, but quick, casual cash-in, it is most certainly not.

Disc one contains three tracks and has a running time of some 76 minutes. The 29-minute rendition of ‘Frankie M’ – as yet unreleased in studio from – in itself encapsulates the Swans live experience in 2014. The builds aren’t simply long and deliberate, but redefine the meaning of both, while the crescendos are beyond immense. Empires rise and fall in less time than it takes for Gira’s vocals to begin, and when they do, the hypnotic repetition and repeated ebb and flow is the song’s key motif. It isn’t until the 24-minute mark that it really explodes. Gira’s liner notes suggest the studio version will be ‘unrecognizable’: it’s going to have to be one hell of a transformation to top the megalithic wall-of-noise climax they’ve created and captured here.

Gira writes that he was pleased to put ‘A Little God in My Hands’ to bed after the band’s extensive tour in support of To Be Kind: the version here builds on the groove the album and drags it out for the best part of a quarter of an hour, with explosive, convulsive blasts of noise that would have probably shaken the foundations pf the venue. As for the 33-minute take on ‘Apost/Cloud of Unforming’, the first occasion on which the band canned the regular ending to ‘The Apostate’ and evolved the improvised ‘Cloud of Unknowing’… wow.

‘Just a Little Boy’ opens disc two, a stark, hypnotic droning affair which bears only a passing resemblance to the studio version, and the embryonic ‘Cloud of Forgetting’ is spectacularly immersive. The centrepiece is undoubtedly the 28-minute ‘Bring the Sun / Black Eyed Man’, which builds early to an almost unbearable crescendo and maintains it for what feels like an eternity. A recording will never capture the full impact of the multisensory, transcendental experience that is a Swans live performance, but in a simple assessment of the audio, The Gate provides one of the strongest live documents of Swans you’re likely to hear (and I say that as someone who adores Public Castration is a Good Idea, but equally realises that what that album captures in terms of sheer brutality, something of the sonic impact is strangely and sadly lost).

The five demo recordings are very different. On the Young God website write-up of the album, Gira describes the recordings as ‘crude’, and indeed, featuring just Gira with his guitar, they’re but fragments, sketches of ideas hammered out, picked and strummed, and only two or three minutes in length.

In many ways, it’s hard to envision how these sparse snippets will evolve into the monumental beasts that go beyond the notion of mere music, made not by human hands but by the very forces of nature. But Gira’s extensive notes are illuminating, with numerous references to ‘groove’ (two of the demos carry the working titles New Rhythm Thing’ and ‘Red Rhythm Thing’) and he writes of his intention to evolve the material with his fellow band-members.

It’s intriguing, of course, to be presented with these pieces before their development, rather than after: most bands will only release demos – often partially evolved studio versions – of songs once they’ve been released, giving fans an orchestrated and somewhat contrived impression that they’re revealing a facet of their working methods, but for Swans, it’s all out there, raw, unplanned, while evidencing from just what small acorns the their mighty oaks which spread to a truly cosmic scale grow.

The end may be nigh for Swans in their current form, but The Gate reminds us much they’ve given during the last few years, and promises a more than fitting finale to this phase of the band’s career.

VON VON022 DVD

Christopher Nosnibor

While art and politics usually exist in entirely different spheres, it’s nigh on impossible to consider Futurism independently of politics, in particular its connections with fascism. Spawned in Italy in the early 20^th Century, with a fixation on youth, speed, cars and technology – in other words, the future – Futurism, while manifesting across virtually all media, was preoccupied with modernity and, equally, violence, war and misogyny. Published in 1909, it was Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ which effectively launched the movement, and boldly stated, ‘We will glorify war —the world’s only hygiene —militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.’

The difficulties Futurism presents are widely acknowledged. Described by The New Yorker as ‘what has long been the most neglected canonical movement in modern art—because it is also the most embarrassing. An avant-garde so clownish, in its grandiose posturing, and so sinister, in its political embrace of Italian Fascism’. Indeed, Marinetti was one of the founding members of the Italian Fascist Party, and sought to make Futurism the official art of the fascist regime of Mussolini, whom Marinetti supported.

It perhaps requires little qualification, therefore, that the weight of history and context renders this a challenging work from a critical perspective. How does one even begin to approach something like this in terms of inescapable context? Or should we attempt to somehow sidestep context and focus purely on the art? What some may consider a more ‘naïve’ reading of Futurism as a style, distinct from its political connotations is surely now possible, given that we live in a world in which the relationships between sign and signifies have been little short of annihilated. Youths who have never even heard of The Rolling Stones, let alone listened to any of their music don ’40 Licks’ T-shirts because they like the design which hangs in a local high street store, likewise mainstream chart fans sport Ramones and Motorhead shirts: to many, Top Shop’s ‘Slayer’ T-Shirt bearing the SS Waffen emblem was just another ‘logo’. Commonplace as it may be, separating context and connotations may prove dangerous. It’s impossible to learn from history if the facts are erased, subsumed as just another marketable product. As such, Futurism should necessarily be approached with due caution.

Recorded in 2009 to commemorate the centenary of the publication of the Manifesto, you may be forgiven for thinking this work is a celebration. However, Thomas Köner is no Futurist apologist. His project is concerned with interrogating Futurism, and extrapolates the connection between the future the Futurists idealised and craved, in the context of the present, the postindustrial world in which humanity is battling for survival against the technology it’s created, and a sleek superhighway transporting information and every other aspect of life at speed has given way to a fragmented virtual space in which neither mainstream or underground have any real sense of time, space or place.

Marinetti’s manifesto also proposed the pursuit of the most avant-garde of objectives, namely to ‘destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy’ – in itself, an exciting, revolutionary notion, albeit one which is seemingly closer to realisation under the auspices of capitalist government than anarchic overthrow or any other form of dismantlement of ‘the establishment’. And it is within this terrain that melting images, soundtracked by dark rumbling ambience and sinister fragments of oration that Köner revisits the historical visions of the future, now little but faded artefacts of the past. How wrong they were. How wrong things are now.

The future has most definitely arrived, and one could even contend that in many respects, it’s been and gone. And yet the current social and political climate suggests a continued obsession with accelerated progress at all cost – speed, youth, (misguided) patriotism. Social divisions and racism are rife as Islam has become synonymous with the face of evil. War is presented as justified in the name of preservation and safety.

In her essay ‘Futurist War Noises: Coping with the Sounds of the First World War’ Selena Daly writes ‘it is widely acknowledged that “noise was Futurism’s contribution to music”’, and Köner’s exploration of that futuristic noise incorporates the use of the prepared piano, once emblematic of avant-gardism, now just another commonplace but ultimately tired and well-established tool which has become synonymous with comfortable, ‘conventional’ experimental practices. And if the likely results are known, the ends result predictable or otherwise forecast, is it still experimental?

Nevertheless, Köner’s soundtrack does most definitely contain noise. Dark, sinister noise, built from fragments and samples from myriad sources, to disquieting effect. In Köner’s (re)presentation and critique, acceleration has reached an imperceptible and infinite pace, and in the audio, the dizzying, disorientating sensation that speed instils is conveyed an agonised, Matrix-like slow-motion, in which the entire score to this disturbing, dislocated film has been slowed to an excruciating 4BPM.

Credit is due to Köner for tackling the ugliness and the sheer horror of the future the Futurists celebrated. The Futurist Manifesto is a difficult and disturbing work, and truly a work of Art.

Thomas Köner Online

Von Archive Releases Online

Noble – NBL-215 – 13th November 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s world music and there’s world music. It seems fitting that the title of Osaka-based composer Takashi Hattori’s debut should suggest music from beyond the inhabited human world, and draws on elements spanning the globe, and, seemingly, far beyond.

It begins with Asian dub colliding with something approximating electronic bagpipes and thumping industrial techno beats. Frenzied orchestral strikes spin in all directions over wildly complex and ever-shifting time signatures. It’s often bewildering, and you can’t help but wonder ‘what the hell is this guy on? Moreover, what does the inside of his head look like?’ It’s the sonic equivalent of a seizure, flashes of mental energy and synapses firing every which way all at once. There’s no question Hattori operates on a different wavelength from pretty much anyone else on the planet.

Magnificently atmospheric passages are rent by sharp blasts of treble, brain-bending motifs looping into eternity and layered one upon the other and strange doodles filter through winds of phase and whistling analogue trills and free jazz whirls in a sonic vortex. 

It takes a rare talent to make something as wide-ranging in its stylistic elements actually work. Arguably not since Captain Beefheart has there been something quite as wildly inventive, or as brain-fryingly multiplicitous in its simultaneous trajectories. A Trout Mask Replica for the 21^st century? Maybe: Hattori clearly couldn’t care less about commercialism or accessibility, and is less concerned with writing ‘songs’ as exploding every convention of genre, structure and linearity. Not so much an album, as an aural quasar in full force.

Takashi Hattori – Moon Online at Noble