Posts Tagged ‘HNW’

Merzbow – The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue

Posted: 7 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Room40 – 9th May 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Merzbow is an artist who requires little to no introduction, and one with a catalogue so immense – with in excess of five hundred releases credited – it’s beyond daunting for not only a beginner, but even a keen noise-lover. This is the reasons I personally own very few releases, and have only picked up a few incidentally along the way.

As Masami Akita approaches seventy, and Merzbow marks forty-five years of noise, this output shows little sign of abating, but it does seem an appropriate time to reflect on some previous releases which may be considered either ‘classic’ or ‘pivotal’. 1994s Venereology has been receiving some retrospective coverage of late, revered largely on account of its reputation for being the loudest, harshest thing ever, ever.

But here we have a reissue of The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue, released a couple of years later, a much lesser-known work, but still during what’s broadly considered to be the golden era of the 90s, and, as the accompanying notes suggest, it’s ‘one of a series of unique editions from his vast catalogue that reveals a side of his practice often under represented.’

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Masami Akita was sometimes working on film and theatre music. In this space he created a series of recordings that capture the full scope of his sound worlds.

Given the nature of these settings, his compositional approaches were varied, seeking to create both intensely crushing walls of sound and more spatial, and at times rhythmic, pieces that plot out an approach to sound making which atomises his universe of sound, and uncovered the singular detail that is often consumed in the whole.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the soundtrack to the theatre piece Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko by Romantica. Based on Marquis de Sades’s Historie de Juliette ou les Prosperités du vice & Les Infortunes de la vertu, this recording was originally released with limited distribution and remains one of the lesser available Merzbow recordings.

Completely remastered and contains an additional cut from those original sessions, this reissue of The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue presents nineteen blasts of noise and rumbling and shrieking, scraping discord and dissonance. Many of the pieces are brief – a couple of minutes or so – and there is so much texture and tonal rage here, its sonic vision is remarkable. To many, of course, it will just ne noise – horrible, nasty, uncoordinated noise. But listen closer, and there is a lot happening here. The noise is, indeed, nasty, and the output is, brain-blasting chaos, for sure. But what these untitled pieces showcase is an intense focus and an attention to detail which is so much more than brutal noise. The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is, comparatively speaking, not that harsh – although when it is harsh, it’s absolutely next-level brutal with shards of treble exploding in walls of ear-shredding punishment. It contains a lot of clattering and crashing, like bin lids being dropped, and cyclical, thrumming rhythmic pulsations. There are tweets and flutters, bird-like chirrups flittering above cement-mixer churning grind with gnawing low-end and splintering treble, overloading grind and would oscillations.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the sound of a man pushing all the buttons and turning all the dials at once and seeing just how far he can tweak them. There are moments of minimalism, of slow, stuttering beats, of mere crackles, passages one might even describe as ambient – a word not commonly associated with Merzbow. But the way in which The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue explores these dynamics, and contains quieter more delicate segments, not to mention some bleepy electronica that borders on beat-free dance in places, is remarkable: while so much noise is simply repellent to anyone who isn’t attuned to it, The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue offers engagement and offers openings to listeners with a broader interest in experimental music.

Eclectic is the word: we hear a chamver orchestra at the same time we hear strings being bent out of shape and what sounds like a Theremin in distress. While a fire alarm squawks in the background. This is everything including the kitchen sink. Imaginative and experimental, it’s noise with infinite dimensions.

AA

RM4195 front

Legion of Swine – L.H.S.

Posted: 7 October 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Dret Skivor – 6th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a few months since we’ve heard from Legion of Swine, one of my favourite vehicles for the intensely prolific Dave Procter – because LOS are noisy, abrasive, and unpredictable, and I have fond memories of numerous demented performances and a couple of collaborative sets together. Even when sadly sans pig-head mask, having developed an allergy to latex, the gnarly electronic noise Dave cranks out is messed up and often times hurts.

Dave, and the Swine, are both highly political animals, and once again it’s politics which have spurred him to clack his trotters into activity and snort his disapproval of current affairs.

L.H.S. is accompanied by uncharacteristically expansive liner notes, which prove useful, and so I shall quote in full:

‘This release pays credit to Värmland folk who campaigned to create a better society and are represented by the letter LHS.

L is Selma Lagerlöf who was heavily involved in women’s suffrage and received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1909.

H is for Gerda and Mauritz Hellberg who were central characters in the right to vote campaign.

S is for Torgny Segerstedt who took a stand against the Nazis in his role as editor at Göteborgs Handels- and Sjöfarts-Tidning.

The image used in this release is a reminder of how the free market is way more important than people in some eyes.’

It lays it all out there, and reminds us how failure to learn from history is guaranteed to doom the future. Admittedly, the way things are looking now, we’re doomed one way or another and likely sooner than anticipated due to sheer greed and a refusal to face facts. In the face of this, there’s a part of me that feels as if complaint or resistance is futile, because we’re already fucked. But we need to go down fighting. We need to at least die trying, to know we’re did our best.

L.H.S. is the sound of the fight. It’s a fucking racket, blasting in from the outset with overloading distortion, cutting in and cutting out, a blasting overload that just hurts and is an instant headache. It’s the harshest of electronica which only gets nastier and more intense and insane as it progresses. By three minutes in, it sounds like someone smashing a bin lid connected to a contact mic, recorded on a mobile phone. The treble is high all the way, and the sounds are metallic, distorting, like someone tearing the door off a garage in a gale or something similarly deranged. And deranged it is, from beginning to end.

We’re in Merzbow territory here. And it actually hurts. Ten minutes in, there are some vocals, but they’re impenetrable shrieking derangement, buried in feedback, before things get really gnarly.

L.H.S. is nasty, and I absolutely love it. I suspect most won’t. It’s one to file alongside Whitehouse, Merzbow, and Prurient. It’s brutal, and as niche as fuck, and Dave knows it. Embrace the pain. This is something else.

AA

AA

a3749396098_10

Vitauct / ცოდნის მფლობელები – Split album (2021)

Posted: 15 August 2021 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Bizarreshampoo – 11th August 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

The last time we heard from Ukranian purveyor of brutal noise, Vitauct, it was the scouring noise abrasion of Breaking Bad back in the spring of 2020; before that, it was the split album with Crepuscular Entity in December 2019. It turns out there’s a whole lot of activity that’s happened in between, including a fair few split releases, and this latest offering is yet another, this time with Georgia-based ცოდნის მფლობელები, an artist who, in his own words ‘uses field recordings to create tracks that try to communicate different states of mind’, and explains that within his work, ‘there is a certain tension and expectation next to a piano taken from some informal performance.

The release is available on double cassette and CD, although the way it’s laid out would also lend itself well to four sides of vinyl, with each artists contributing two fifteen-minute / side-long compositions, alternating, with Vitauct occupying sides A and C, and ცოდნის მფლობელები occupying sides B and D.

The first piece, ‘Search’ is perhaps more ‘Destroy’: a tearing wave of harsh noise that simply blasts the sense for quarter of an hour straight with barely no perceptible variation, it’s practically HNW, bar some subtle shifts and reverberations of pain echoing in the background. It howls and screams, but mostly it’s like the sound of ground zero of an atomic bomb, and it just goes on, and on, without mercy, shredding the air and blasting away at the organs from the inside.

‘თვალთვალი’, the first of the two tracks from ცოდნის მფლობელები, offers a quite different tone and atmosphere. The sound is murky, swampy, almost subaquatic in its drowned muffledness, and there’s a low, slow, rhythmic rise and fall like a tidal current that drags you along in surging increments, pulling, then releasing a little, before pulling again. It’s dense – suffocatingly so – and gurgles, dark and abstract while creating some kind of sensory deprivation that becomes more intense and unnerving the longer it persists. Everything slows. Nothing happens. It feels as if time has stalled, and you’re hanging in suspended animation, unable to speak, unable to move, incapacitated and simply floating, paralysed. You start to find interest in the most granular detail, in the same way you wonder if you need to go over parts of a wall you’ve just painted because you can’t be sure if you’ve missed a bit or it’s just drying faster than other areas. You wonder how long you will remain trapped here, if the nightmare will ever end, if, indeed, you will ever escape to the surface. It’s a long and torturously slow fifteen minutes, and when it does finally end, you’re left feeling limp, drained.

And then it’s back for round two: with ‘Uncertainty’, Vitauct brings a crackling fizz of overloading static and digital distortion that sounds like your speaker cones are torn. It’s a tonal / textural combination that’s almost guaranteed to disrupt the equilibrium because it simply sounds like everything is fucked – both your equipment and your hearing – and sets a churning in the pit of the stomach. This could perhaps be some kind of auditory trick of sorts that sets the listener off balance, like an infection or damage in the inner ear. It’s painful, but as an example of devastating mid-range harsh noise, it’s outstanding.

‘იდეოლოგიის მეტრონომი’ is the final piece, another fifteen minutes of murky, bubbling babbling. This time, it feels speeded up, and the bubbling babbling sounds like a large gathering of people, chattering excitedly underwater, while a stream of analogue synth streams and stammers in a sustained state of agitation. It’s an unheimlich, otherly experience that’s unsettling and uncomfortable – which is a fair summary of this release as a whole.

If its hour duration seems daunting, in some respects I suspect that’s part of the intention: this is not a release for noise casuals, but that hardcore who have real staying power and probably something of a masochistic streak. For such a niche genre, the amount of material it has yielded – and continues to yield – is astronomical, and it’s not always easy to differentiate the quality form the lethargic, but as we’ve come to expect from Vitauct and his pairings, this is strong stuff.

AA

a3215801437_10

Heinous Whining # 7 – 9th May 2020

Posted: 9 May 2020 in Live
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Christopher Nosnibor

Much as I think the live stream shows that have become a thing during lockdown are a great way for bands to stay connected with their fans when tours have been cancelled, and artists and fans alike are frustrated and apart, I’ve struggled to get into them as an experience.

Discussing this with a gig-mate, I explained that I’d tried a few guitar bands doing streams from bedrooms , and found the experience of just one or two band members doing acoustic stuff and chatting a fair bit in between may create a certain sense of an intimate setting, but lacks the multisensory aspects, as well as the impact of music at gig volume.

‘I did do a couple early on’, my friend replied, adding ‘It’s not really what I want. I want to go to a gig.’

It struck me that that was it, in a nutshell. A stream is not a gig. TV, radio, YouTube, a live album… is not a gig. It’s like arguing that a Kindle is like a book. It may well be, but it isn’t, and the things it lacks are the reason it will never be a convincing or authentic sensory substitute. When it comes to live music, the cliché ‘you had to be there’ is ineffable. Yes. You do actually have to be there.

Nevertheless, with friends whose music I’m into on tonight’s lineup, I decided to invest a little more in recreating the live experience, starting with a pre-gig pint, which I texted pictures of to various people. Being a warm night, I didn’t put the heating up, but I did draw the blind and shut the door to my office, and put the display full screen (The streaming chat is irritating and detracts from both the music and the visuals, however sparse) and cranked the speakers up, and sat back to witness low rumblings and slow-decaying chimes that marked the start of Möbius’ set. The visuals consist of a dark background and shining points of yellow-white light. Wordless dual vocals ring out and resonate against one another, generating a subtle power, somewhere between Gregorian chanting and Jarboe at her most ethereal. The drones grow denser, louder, the effect of a single note sustained for an eternity increases as time passes: my body hums at the same frequency for a time, before the resonant echoes are gradually swallowed in a swell of distortion. Chances are, if played at the same volume, a recording would have the same effect, but it’s an immersive set nevertheless.

DSC_4118[1]

Möbius

Between-acts, there’s some obscure noise mix streaming, and Plan Pony is up next, blasting out speaker-mangling low-end distortion. If the noise is impressive, it’s matched by polarised visuals. Manipulating blasts of harsh guitar sampled in real-time and thrashed through an immense table fill of effects, the output is a sonic blitzkrieg. The quiet passages don’t translate quite as well, partly because my neighbour’s got a mate round and they’ve got the radio on in her back yard, but some snarled-up samples and snippets of music emerge from the grumbling electronics as he twiddles knobs, before long building again to a shattering wall of harsh noise.

DSC_4119[1]

Plan Pony

Zad Kokar takes things to next-level wtf, with bewilderingly nightmarish visuals that ae probably best described as max Headroom on acid, accompanying a blizzard of audio mashup that’s like early Prodigy in collision with early cabaret Voltaire. Both on acid. Diverting from the in-yer-face mental shit, we’ve got Clean Wipe, a guy in shorts stroking a doorframe while tweaking knobs on effects pedals at a circular kitchen table while the background changes colour constantly. It takes me an age to realise there must be contact mics on the door frame, and I can’t decide if I need more beer or I’ve had too much already.

It’s been a strong start, and TCH, on at number 4, take the mood and volume down a bit, but in a good way. The noise is dark and dingy, and reflects the setting in which we see a hooded figured tweaking minimal kit in a small, mildew-stained room. It’s more like watching a documentary on heroin withdrawal than a musical performance.

DSC_4130[1]

TCH

I clock 61 viewers, which is probably about the capacity of CHUNK, and the nights thy host are usually BYOB, so cracking a can of ALDI’s The Hop Stepper that I fetched from downstairs between acts seems consistent with being there.

Petrine Cross is Esmé of Penance Stare doing one-woman black metal at a million decibels. The set’s an ear-shattering mess of noise and distortion and visually, it’s stark, dark and black and white. The sound is overloaded, borderline unlistenable, but that’s likely intentional, and it’s clear some effort’s gone into this. Each song has its title on-screen at the start, there’s a plug for a charity compilation (again, on-screen text means no need for awkward chat) and songs are intercut with footage of the cat. It’s belting. And her room as some nice cornice work.

DSC_4134[1]

Petrine Cross

It’s a distorted dictaphone tape recording – a fractured ranted monologue about life in isolation under lockdown – that provides the material for Duncan Harrison’s set. It captures the mental tension of the moment so well, it’s uncomfortable listening. It’s followed by Energy Destroyer’s barrage of noise accompanied by video footage of him swinging either nunchucks or lengths of rubber in his back garden, and it’s the bodywarmer that makes it.

It’s disorientating watching the back of a performer’s head as they play and seeing them again on the PC monitor before them, with the whole scene framed by leaves and soundtracked by birdsong and incidental rumblings. But this is what we get from Garden Magik, whose set evolves gradually into a digital storm. At some point in the gale-force distortion, I realise my mind isn’t entirely on the set, but then, in a live setting, I would have likely enjoyed the sonic experience but found my mind wandering to maters of work and other stuff – and that’s no criticism. Under lockdown, in my office, it’s even easier to become distracted by text messages and FaceBook.

Content’s ‘If Hard Work Pay Show Me Rich Donkey’ leaps out as a feature of the between-act PA tunage before Sadistic Statistic, who give us more garden footage and a full-on Merzbow blast of obliterative sonic carnage. The images of cats are unrepresentative: the melting digitisations less so: at times, it sounds like it looks: brain-shredding, difficult, and impossible to pin down. Harsh is the new norm here: this is one of those sets that leaves you feeling utterly wrung out by the time the last sparking crackle fades.

DSC_4137[1]

Sadistic Statistic

Stuart Chalmers takes us on a mesmerising tour of a cave, before Otherworld bring gloopy, cracking electronics accompanied by swirling pixelated patterns that aren’t exactly easy on the retinas. It’s low-level noise that’s centred around slow-, hypnotic pulsations. It’s pitch-black in the room now bar the screen and I’m staring fixedly at the shifting shapes as the sound ripple around me, and the experience is quite gig-like until Mrs N returns an extension lead, which isn’t quite the same as being handed a final pint before the train.

DSC_4138[1]

Otherworld

In terms of lineup and performances, this was a hell of a night. It would, unquestionably, have been infinitely better to have witnessed it in person, surrounded by other people also witnessing it in person: atmosphere is interaction, but also an unspoken feeling that passes between people in a room. Virtual claps posted on a chat stream simply cannot replace real time reactions. But, while it’s the best we’ve got, it’ll have to do. What I took from tonight is that some genres seems better equipped to operate differently, and experimental electronic odd shit, with its propensity for visuals and playing in darkness, seems to have less work to do to adapt than conventional rock formats, making this the closest to the live experience I’ve yet witnessed. And yes, I had a blast. And made it home with no problems, too.