Nada -- AWKWARD Y BARRACHO CORE DEL TODO [Flying Esophagus]

The aliens have landed, and they come bearing samplers and twisted lyrics.... This CD sounds like an artifact of another planet in a distant galaxy, a place where they swim in a sea of samples, drink mutant heavy beats, and cheerfully fuck every effects gadget that doesn't move fast enough. The basic plan most of the time is to suck the listener in with something fairly catchy and kind of mellow, then when it's too late to back out, begin inducing a severe cranial hemhorrage, kind of like feeding young innocents sweet halloween candy laced with Clorox. Led by Robert M. Riddle IV with help from the likes of Trance guitarist/drum-abuser Mason Jones, nada covers a lot of ground in fairly restless fashion. Like sand dunes in a windstorm, everything changes just about the time you get a handle on it.... "apopolysp" hands down a thudding hip-hop beat and stuttering noises, while "ignatio chloride the balding" sports jazzy guitar lines that get you grooving almost Sinatra-style, then this gloriously ugly death-riff begins pounding on your head, like Black Sabbath on crack; most spiffy! Plus it boasts the immensely cool line "'buenos dias uber alles' -- a slow dive with the fists of god," which sure beats the hell out of nearly anything i've heard on the radio lately. "string [premonition v]" thumps along in a sick Pain Teens vibe while Rob hisses "it's neat when she says knife -- nails, kisses, hammers, teeth / glow halo's rust, it's underlight, a fright with claws that scratch beneath..." before turning into a buzzing thunderfest of blood, murder, lies, and sheer sonic terror. "afraid" is just as creepy, with a sick scraping riff and more unpleasant lyrics, a brain tumor in search of a skull to sleep in. "near" pulses in menacing fashion before dub/hip- hop/monster-riff sneer of "zoviet amerikkka" chews your spinal cord away and "nothing" flushes it down the cosmic toilet. And at the very end of the liner notes, nada admonish you to "kiss the goat" for absolutely no good reason at all. I like that. (It's a Capricorn thing, you wouldn't understand.)

Nadja is essentially drone-god Aidan Baker's contribution to doom: three epic songs (the shortest one is 11:40, the longest just over twenty minutes) of heavy, slo-mo dissonant drone-metal. Much like Godflesh circa PURE (particularly the tail end), only even slower and drenched in layers of droning bass and guitars. Beats from a drum machine appear off and on, but in the background, providing a distant pulse over which fuzzed-out doom guitars lurch through dreamy, repetitive riffs while other guitars provide texture in the form of noise, keyboard-like melodic lines, and symphonic chords. The result is something akin to Godflesh covering Troum, all trance beats at the speed of crawl as a universe of dark ambient sound and melancholy riffs revolves around those narcoleptic beats. Elements of psychedelia, free jazz, drone, and experimental music all come into play with the ambient and melodic elements, but it's the subterranean riffs of despair that make it so doomlike. The future of doom? The world should be so lucky....

Nashville Pussy -- EAT MORE PUSSY [Amphetamine Reptile]

Wow, a record so raunchy that AMPHETAMINE REPTILE feels the need to bag it with a plain silver wrapper? The same AmRep that regularly issues hateful covers by the likes of the Unsane? Why, whatever can be so... so... (unwraps cover) uh-oh... naughty, naughty.... bald black men eating white pussy could cause some ADVERSE REACTIONS in the South, this is true... look at Ruyter yelp! Woo! Man, she sure has a hell of a lot o' cavities... not to mention cleavage.... Let's see that back cover, then -- woo, they be a pretty tuff- lookin' bunch... and there's more of Ruyter's cleavage! Is this a major selling point for the band or what? (Must be, it's on the CD cover and inlay tray card as well... then again, if I had Ruyter's cleavage, goddamn, i'd show it off too....)

So anyway, i figured there was no way this band can live up to the hype (they're being called "Motorhead with tits" and receiving a ridiculous amount of press cleavage, excuse me, coverage -- mostly, i suspect, as an excuse to run photos of Corey and Ruyter, bassist and guitarist, wearing damn near nothing)... but gawd, they do and then some. Now i'm really regretting that i didn't go see them during SXSW (of course, that would have violated my no-SXSW policy, but it would have been worth it). Bascially the entire album sounds like no-frills bad-ass rock and roll played REAL LOUD by people who are pretty messed up, but not messed up enough to miss the beat. Now, there is probably not a smidgen of originality in any of this -- but they do it real, real well, better than anybody has in years (maybe since Motorhead's glory days even, although i'd have to hear another album or two from them to give 'em that just yet). Plus they steal from the right places (Ted Nugent, Motorhead, Cheap Trick, etc.), leave out all the bad parts of said influences (ie., no million-year-long wank solos, no dippy outfits or goofy destined-to-be-a-radio-crossover-hit ballads), have a sense of humor, and they play REALLY LOUD. Did i mention that they play loud? This is real white trash rock and it crushes the pee out of every so-called "rock" album released since... since... uh, in a real long time. (When WAS the last time somebody released a plain old rock album actually worth hearing, anyway?)

I suppose i should mention the songs or something... there's twelve of them, none are terribly long, and they feature lots o' exploding ampflifiers and Ruyter's amazing guitar mayhem, plus lots of phrases like "i'm the man / a real motherfucker" and "hey all you kids / stay outta my yard / i'll beat your ass / 'cause that makes me hard." "Johnny Hotrod" sounds just like Cheap Trick's "She's Tight" on massive steroids, "Blowin' Smoke" sounds like ORGASMATRON-era full-tilt Motorhead, and "Fried Chicken and Coffee" is just plain fuckin' funny. And Ruyter is flat-out the only squiggly-wiggly lead guitarist i've heard worth listening to in years. This band rocks so hard it'll make you pee in your pants. Really.

Buy this album. Reward Ruyter handsomely for her cleavage so maybe AmRep will be inspired to let them make some semi-pornographic videos featuring monster trucks and half-naked band members. Why should poofy-lipped Fiona Apple get all the record sales, dammit? Ruyter's MUCH dirtier-looking....

Yes, I admit it -- I like Nashville Pussy mainly because I want to fuck Ruyter Suys, who looks really good in a black push-up bra. However, it doesn't hurt that the band cranks like a mofo and they have that nicely depraved white-trash vibe that i so greatly adore from "Southern musicians." And make no mistake, on this disc -- their second full-length proper, not including the limited-edition EAT MORE PUSSY disc that cobbled together all their now-impossible-to-get singles and a few other odds and ends -- they are staking out a claim on the Southern-fried boogie rock tradition. LET THEM EAT PUSSY may have been a borderline punk album with its reckless, full-throttle, train-barreling-off-a-cliff drive, but this is far more controlled and makes room for actual solos and stuff; look out, Ruyter is the second coming of Angus Young! If Ruyter and Angus did the nasty, the result would be a baby with a Gibson in his fat li'l hands going weedle weedle weedle all day long....

Now, let's face it: there is no way you can take this band seriously on any level (except maybe playing ability); they are more of a garish cartoon than a band, okay? We're talking a serious dedication to the white-trash ethic; two hot and generally half-naked women, one of whom is covered in tattoos and spits fire; a singer who looks like the official spokesman for the Hells Angels and sounds even meaner; and titles like "Struttin' Cock," "Shoot First and Run Like Hell," "Piece of Ass," and "Blowjob From a Rattlesnake." Mein gott, they actually have a song called "Rock and Roll Outlaw" -- how much more Spinal Tap can you get? Fortunately, this is all intentional (i think), and they have the chops to make all this silliness worthwhile. Plus they have a secret weapon... no, not Ruyter's cleavage, that's hardly a secret dammit, they're practically the main selling point of the band. No, their secret weapon is Ruyter's flyin' fingers. She rocks like a pee dog, like a bastard, like a motherfucker, like she never stopped playing her Ted Nugent records even after he stopped being "relevant," and I'd be happy to find out what else she could do with those flying fingers if it weren't for the fact that she's married to Blaine (the aforementioned scary singer), who looks like he could probably rip my arms off and beat me to death with them while gulping down fried chicken and coffee, so maybe we should forget that observation, yah?

So anyway, if you are already hep to Nashville Pussy's brand o' jeans-stainin' wango tango rawk, then you already know more or less what to expect here. Big riffs, big leads, big tits, big big big everything. Plus lots of dirty words and attitude problems. The best song on the album is "Go To Hell" (luv that title, btw), which could actually be a big-deal radio hit except for the tiny part about "I caught my wife fucking two of my friends / A smile on her face / A dick in each hand / Guilt runnin' down her chin." Speaking of sex and guns, both are wildly abundant all over the album. Hell, they're on the cover. At least you can't accuse them of false advertising or anything.... The rest of the songs are pretty hep too. If you have any sense (and a sense of humor) you'll like it.

Did i mention that I want to... o, i did? Uh, never mind....

TTBMD: This is very cool. This sounds like somebody beating up a deranged accordion.

TMU: There are an awful lot of people making funny noises here and i'm not entirely sure what they're doing. Free jazz on the wing, freestyle. Lots of oompahing and squeaking. Melodic zephyrs for an army of rocking chairs. HEEWACK!

TTBMD: This is a live recording. Would have been very nice to have been there to witness the action.

TMU: It sounds like they were meshing together well.

TTBMD: Yeah, a couple of the guys are really... they're drunk, dude. Some of the song titles are like a story about how drunk they are at this performance. But this one is called "Static Beauty."

TMU: They do sound as if they've had a few.

TTBMD: This next one is called "Fischer, the only one not inebriated, stammered in disbelief 'But I'm sober!' as the sadistic bartender cut him off early in the evening."

TMU: I guess that tells us everything we need to know, don't it? Are these seriously like, fucking bird calls in this song? Or am I just too hopped-up on go pills and paint thinner? Is that the problem? Is that, maybe, do you think, like, possibly, THE GOD DAMN SHIT POKING PROBLEM?

TTBMD: Sounds like he's searching for change on the beach. It's the sound of -- it's like a field recording of some cranky old men from the retirement center going out to the beach and hitting each other with the metal detectors. Drunk old men. Drunk old farts. Searching for buried treasure and finding only bottlecaps. Getting into fights over goddamn bottlecaps.

TMU: I don't hear anything now. Oh wait, someone's dismembering a sax or something.

TTBMD: This one is called... wait, this is still the second song. Let's try "Charles, unable to reach the right level of consumption he expected, played within the confines of sobriety." Damn catchy title. Easy to remember.

TMU: But probably more poetic than the title of that horribly obscure, cult tune by Electric Goat Felcher i've been listening to all week.

TTBMD: You mean "All Good Subatomic Particles Dipped in the Blood of the Goat Forswear the Atomic Ass Oath of Eternal Deviance While the Children of the Night Rock and Roll Over With the Great God Pan While Wearing Korn T-Shirts in Bitchin' Cameros?"

TMU: Yes, that one.

TTBMD: Dude, that song blows turds.

TMU: But it's cult. It's very fucking cult.

TTBMD: I've been possessed by someone else. What's going on?

TMU: We now return to our original programming... what's with all the hovercraft noises? Do we even know what song we're on? Are we all confused? It's that paint thinner, isn't it? You told me this wasn't the pure shit....

TTBMD: This is an excellent CD. Visit Public Eyesore's site and contemplate all the fine products they have.

TMU: A wise suggestion, o my brother. I'd like to add before we move on that this is a fine example of the ensemble playing in the free jazz realm so often favored by the stylish cats at Public Eyesore. These people know how to make the sounds of the Other World. The vibrations of the Great Snake.

TTBMD: They have great packaging on this too, and this artwork is a bit more straightforward than some of the label's stuff. This has definitely got a more ambient yet abrasive feel to it.

TMU: I detect the proton strands of Sun Ra in the cosmic goo sloppin' around here. Sun Fuckin' Ra -- He is IN the motherfuckin' HOUSE here! HEEWACK!

TTBMD: Sun Ra would be proud.

TMU: Now I am possessed by the Headless Chicken of the Seven Churches! Kculc kculc!

TTBMD: Hey, I like Church's Chicken!

TMU: Did the hovercraft land yet?

TTBMD: It will never land. It is a journey that never ends. A flight of consciousness destined for a star that doesn't exist.

TMU: Their plaintive wailing saxophone is but one of the bitter reeds in the mighty Pipe of Doom that Erich Zann built back in the day! Oooo, the sound grows hypnotic... my inner chicken swells with pride as the egg grows....

TTBMD: (stares with disbelief)

TMU: I think perhaps we should continue our question onto the next CD. Our work here is done. The egg has been properly irradiated. Soon... The Goat Spore hatches, doom childe.

TTBMD: Um.... onward....

Nature & Organization / Current 93 / Tiny Tim / Nurse With Wound [Durtro]

This little silver platter was sold as a special item to commemorate the C93 Halloween shows in NY this year. Not sure what the title is, so... The first track, by Nature and Organization is quite impressive. It is a cover of a song written by Rod McKuen and Jacques Brel titled "To You". A bittersweet and beautiful song about love's lost and found. Current 93 have two tracks. One is an alternate version of "The Seven Seals" which is interesting, but not nearly as good as what eventually made the cut for LUCIFER OVER LONDON. All of these tracks supposedly were intended for OF RUNE AND SOME BLAZING STARRE, but were later dropped as they were deemed to not fit in very well. Tiny Tim sings a cheesy love song called "My Inspiration Is You" over the phone which adds immensely to the humor. The Nurse With Wound is a short, but nifty track that reminds me most of the Tod Dockstader method of tape manipulation. Last but not least, a suave Louis Wain painting adorns the cover artwork to make this a true production from catland. [yol]

This band from Baltimore shares the same glitch / noise / freakout aesthetic as the rest of the bands on Load, but they differ markedly in one amazing way: regardless of what it sounds like on the disc, no electricity or computers were responsible for generating the psychotic sounds heard here. No, their fucked-up sound comes from infernal devices of their own devising, built specifically for this recording or from knowledge of previous "real lab experience" -- custom gadgets made of plastic, leather, wire, rubber, maybe even fetishwear for all we know. The two head tone scientists in charge, Carly Ptak and Twig Harper (who also shows up on the Metalux disc, and if you're hep to that one, you'll be down with this too), fashioned this unsettling collection of disturbed sounds with the help of ten other guests, including people from Forcefield, Paperrad, and Costes. This is just the latest of many releases on Hanson and its own label Heresee; if they're all as equally filled with such lovely grotesqueries as this one, I can see how they got to be "an integral forefather of much of the MidWest noise scene." Noisy they certainly are -- none of this will even remotely pass for pop music -- but there's an organization and a certain rhythm to their brand of audio destruction that creeps up in the direction of pop at times. The rest of the time it's just noisy, devolved, and will probably frighten your children. You could probably write a dissertation on how they made the album and built the instruments and what it all means, dude (and I'm sure some smelly, Cheetos-stained grad student at M.I.T. is doing just that right now, probably while listening to Lightning Bolt), but you don't need to know all the technology-fu to appreciate the madness at work as it blows out your speakers. You'll find it moving... deeply moving. Like a mental enema, only much louder. Plus you won't be able to hear right for at least a day or two. A small price to pay for liberating your mind, nu?

Despite what you might think from the band's name, they have absolutely nothing to do with Nazism; they just want to irritate you, that's all. Given their interest in cosmic/future themes and their space-age retrro-trash fashion sensibility, i'd guess that the Mars part of their name is a far more accurate representation of where they're coming from. Basically the Netherlands answer to Blondie (or maybe Ramones) fused with DNA from Atari Teenage Riot, Vanya (looking very stylish on the cover in shades, green tennies, and a green jacket -- Gawd, i think i'm in luv, someone hold me!) leads the way with uberfuzz guitar and lots of shouting/chirping (sort of like Bjork on steroids or amphetamines; judging from the pills on the cover, i'm opting for the latter) while a synth churns out bouncy rhythms and crazed sc-fi noises. Fuzzed guitars and clunking, stuttering synths battle with each other in the snotty "Why Don't You Like Us?" (the snyths win just for the jerking death-twitch toward the end)The synths make all sorts of UFO blips and bleeps on "Space Trip -- Cosmic Journey," while the deathfuzz guitars grind away and Vanya chirps about visiting the outer planets. Then they remind you that they are a punk band over all else with the sneering "I Hate This World" -- a band after my own heart....The trend continues with "Animal Farm 2084," an updated futuristic answer to George Orwell's grim dystopia complete with a synth break in the middle that Jimmy Destri would have been pleased to claim as his own in Blondie. I like this band. I like them so much that the day after Vanya sent a CD-R with all the tunes, i sent $$$ to actually buy the singles. Perhaps you should do the same.

The cover says its all -- four vaguely thuggish-looking technopunk teens with Vanya upfront holding a guitar that says "FUCK YOU." You don't even need to listen to the single to like this band. But you should listen to the single, because it's most swank. (Be warned, though, that they favor garage-style production -- a plus with me as long as it's listenable, which this certainly is, but if you're expecting pristine 48-track recording quality here you have come to the wrong place.) As with the first single, NFM come across as a supremely fuzzed-out version of Blondie (or Ramones, depending on their mood) crossed with Atari Teenage Riot (minus the sloganeering). My favorite song on here is the first one, "Tina Technopunk Teen," which sounds like it was directly inspired by the Ramones' "Rockaway Beach" (Vanya even manages to reel off a "gabba gabba hey!" between verses), but here the fuzz guitars are offset by percolating dirt-synth. "Working Class Superhero" is just about as hep, especially with the sneering chorus that ends in "I don't wanna work from 9 to 5 / and I don't wanna be your slave." Apparently they don't like working for a living any more than i do.... "1000 Ways" has plenty of the kind of drive and sheer attitude that i like, not to mention that it sounds really fuzzy and trashy, and "Elton Jackson" is just plain one baby step away from deranged. I'm already counting out the bills to buy their first CD the minute it becomes available, mon....

Ever wonder what Lightning Bolt would sound like playing black metal? Yo, homes, I got your metal right here. Two guitars, drums, and a grim devotion to black and thrash metal gods like Celtic Frost and Voivod (the promo thingy mentions Man is the Bastard, but that's mainly in the vocals -- the guitars are pure metal, the drums are... um, very hyperkinetic). They have a tendency to play ridiculously fast, their "singer" sounds like he's undergoing a particularly painful barium enema, and they have swell titles like "Small Field of Death," "Large Field of Death," and "Broken Glass For Dinner." They have a former member of USAISAMONSTER hiding somewhere behind all that equipment, the cd artwork is amazing, and they have one of the greatest names ever. If there is a metal bone in your body, you should already be counting out the bills to pick this one up. Excellent music to listen to at full blast while preparing to set your neighbor on fire for whining about the volume on your stereo.

A rock band who have the Secret Weapon... oooo, a xylophone! They also have damaged but highly entertaining ideas about electronics and music and loud guitars (two of them), not to mention a pounding bass. This five-song ep is a pretty swank introduction to the band: not long enough to get tedious but with enough songs to get across their diversity of sound. I like a great many things about this ep: the way "Carbon Freeze" sounds like a lost Band of Susans song (the connection's probably not accidental: one of the Braun brothers, not sure which one since i can't keep 'em straight anyhow, played with Band of Susans on one of their later tours); the fact that Jay Braun and Jun Takeshta play "left and right" guitars; the way "thin automation" really swings, like, you know, real bands used to do before it apparently became hip to jump up 'n down instead; that they have Moogs and use them shamelessly; that they are probably big Devo fans. Devo should have had a xylophone, it would have saved them when the chips were down.... I also really like that "information processing" is really just a bunch of cool noise. They are also really loud 'n bright-sounding, another thing that went tragically out of fashion a few years back. So maybe their sound creeps toward retro, yah, but that is not such a bad thing, eh? Besides... you can't fuck with them, man, they have the goddamn xylophone of the gods... fear them... fear them....

Guitarist Jay Braun once toured with the Band of Susans, and it's easy to see how they'd all be on the same wavelength -- he and his bandmates (including his brother Justin) in the Negatones share that band's fondness for loud, distorted guitars, strange noises, and straight-ahead rock beats. This ep is the latest collection of nifty tunes (five of them, in fact). Their electronic bent only reinforces the idea that their roots are largely in eighties rock, but that's okay with me -- bands like the Cars and Devo still do a whole hell of a lot more for me than most of what passes for modern music right now. This ep also reintroduces the welcome concept, one that I wish more bands would pick up on, of keeping things to the point: they whip through five songs, not even particularly fast songs at that, in just under eleven minutes. Now that's what I call keepin' it lean. I approve of this concept. More bands interested in making commercial / accessible music should bone up on the subject, maybe even take a gander at the work of the zen masters here.

Oddly enough, even with the obvious eighties influence at work, the band sounds remarkably modern -- have the sounds of everyday life finally caught up with the bleeps 'n bloops of eighties synth music, perhaps? Whatever, the songs rock, they got that rock 'n roll swing but that punk fondness for keepin' it short, and they are not afraid of harmony, melody, and weird noises. Plus they have a really hep drummer. And, judging from the cover on the back of the cd, lots of swell vintage equipment, including analog synths and other indescribable yet lovely gadgets. O, rapture! And they even do their own recording (which sounds pretty good, actually, especially given the limitations of four-track sound). I cannot use the word swell enough here... perhaps someday I shall even have the opportunity to see them live, which I suspect would be much fun.

Negativland -- IPSDESPI [Seeland]

Goofy and catchy tunes that are amusing, but this is certainly not another U2, nor does it really approach the genius of ESCAPE FROM NOISE. This time, the target of their fair use pranks is the carbonated soft drink industry: Coca-Cola vs. PepsiCo. If one is so inclined, certain songs may end up lodged in the brain causing the urge to break out in song whilst waiting in line at the grocery store. Of course, this satiric humor has a serious side, pointing out not only the ridiculously low-brow nature of soda jingles (if not the irony of soda advertizing on the whole) and the sad fact that despite all of the world's ills -- poverty, disease, war, etc. -- soda is a more prevalant fixture in our lives. Interestingly, it struck me that the packaging was almost more elaborate than the content, which could well be part of the gimmick. [yol]

Apocalyptic folk with power-electronics leanings -- this is a bit more lo-fi than the full-length disc reviewed in the previous issue, but it's still plenty potent. The cassette (with two songs on one side and one on the other) is not terribly long, but long enough to get the idea: folk stylings (especially on the first track) are gradually overtaken by rumbling waves of power electronics. NPF's version of power electronics is pretty European to my ears, oddly enough -- not so much interested in the carnage and ear-damage of high-pitched wailing as much as the low, steady rumble of corrosion and collapsing buildings. The second track is very reminiscent of old-school power ensembles like The Grey Wolves, Con-Dom, Throbbing Gristle, and other UK artists fond of burying their sonic fear in heavy sheets of noise drone. The titles (and liner notes, for that matter -- now that's hardcore) are in Norwegian and since my grasp of Norwegian is tragically rusty and i can't read the evil font anyway, i can't tell you about the circumstances under which these tracks were recorded, but they're certainly not lacking in the dark ambient doom department. I like the repetitive machinery rumble that ends the second track on the first side.... The side-long title track opens with a shuddering dirge note that goes on and on, doom waiting to happen, and over a period of time, other drones and sound elements begin to work their way forward, then back into the background. The drone wails on, but the background keeps slowly... shifting. Just about the time you get used to the flow of movement, the motion grows static for a while. The sound itself is the sound of generators humming as black, soulless machinery starts slowly coming to life. Then the sound itself shifts... and the machinery keeps coming to life, the drone drilling endlessly. As for the packaging itself, the cassette comes in a VHS box with a wraparound cover and nice cardstock inserts, and the release is limited to a hundred copies. I'd advise those new to NPF to start with the Cryonic Mind cd, then check this out afterwards for an example of NPF in a more restrained mood....

Heavy fucking shit, mon. I largely gave up on power electronics a while back ago because so many of the genre's practitioners either spend way too much effort trying to out-evil each other (in both sonics and image), or else they sound like they're just doing random jazz with fuzzboxes, but this release revives my faith in the belief that interesting things can still be done within the context of noise and power electronics. Fair warning: the beginning track "perdition genesis" takes no prisoners -- straight out of the gate it's harsh, cut-up metal-flange noise reverberating back and forth between the speakers as a growling industrial death drone grows while the flanges recede. The machinery of noise begins to grind away as disembodied chanting voices drone in the background, only to be drowned out by the approaching death machine. By the track's end, the voices are almost totally obscured by the roar of the machine, right up until it abruptly stops and the reverbed piano of "folk ar mindre krykliga nufortiden" changes the tone completely. Ominous death ambient sounds shudder and hum in the background as looped piano plays over and over, like an abandoned calliope in a forgotten field squeaking in the wind as the storm approaches. The forbidding sound of chanting and a scary drum is the center of "the encompassing hymn of human nature" -- an exercise in minimalism with shifting patterns in the background, there if you want to hear them.

NPF's inspiration comes from old-school industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, The Grey Wolves, Psywarfare, and other bands who were doing their thing without being enslaved to the beat; accordingly, while there's plenty of rhythmic content on this disc, it's all in the form of noise and machine-byproduct. There's a hypnotic, droning element to most of the material, and some songs such as "060443 produciton / consumption" are almost nothing but repetitive, chugging machine sounds. The real key to NPF's sound is in the dynamics -- the initial sound source may keep repeating, but it rises and falls in the mix, sometimes to be drowned out by other sounds or drowning them out. It's the sound of vast, uncaring machinery coming to life to destroy the earth. The songs themselves are nothing more than detailed snapshots of the machine in different spots, so to speak. It's a pretty forbidding sound, and one much harsher and unnerving than their recent, more ambient release on Crucial Blast (reviewed last issue). It's obvious that NPF pays a lot of attention to detail in the sounds and their relation to each other, and to the dynamics within the songs and between them -- something you don't see too much of these days, what with people just shoveling stuff into a four-track and waffling until the tape runs out. I like this band. I must hear more....

Loud, jump-cut noise hell. OUCHIE. Well, that's the first track, anyway -- some of the later tracks aren't quite so satanically ear-frying, just composed of various scrunchy noises going "oomgha oomgha" and trying to out-scrunch each other. We're talking about some pretty abrasive sound content... plus it's mastered very, very loud. The fourth track is a bit more revealing in its high-pitched drone and clanking ping-ping rhythm, while the fifth and final track is back to the cascading wave of noisedrone and things being clanked, pounded on, and so forth. Not bad, especially when an incredibly primitive beat comes in, but all in all i think the other Nexialist discs were on to something a bit different and more interesting. This is okay, but for someone who's already heard approximately enough noise cds to give one to every child in China, it's not offering much that's new. Already i am preparing to go back to the Fragment King disc for further study....

Phill Niblock -- FOUR FULL FLUTES [Experimental Intermedia]

Viva le minimalism! This disc is so unspeakably MONDO that it defies all description. But of course I'm going to describe it anyway, since that's kind of the whole point of the whole "review" process, isn't it? Am i right? Of course i'm right, i'm the monkey on a stick in the glass cage here and it's MY CAGE, natch....

So anyway, Niblock is a microtonal composer whose modus operandi is to record examples of an instrument (in this case, flute), then create "tone blocks" from that by editing out the breathing spaces. Then he clusters these tone blocks, each differing in pitch by only minute variations, systematically assigning them to specific intervals within the composition and panned across eight tracks. (The liner notes include the mix scores, which are wonderfully enigmatic, cryptic, and totally incomprehensible without reading the liner notes carefully. A degree in spectral physics and a thorough grounding in sound theory wouldn't hurt, either.)

The result is... well... microtonal. There are four pieces here; the first two, "P K" and "S L S," performed by Petr Kotik (alto flute) and Susan Stenger (flute) respectively, were actually designed to be played together. The third piece, in fact, is a mix of the two pieces, called "P K & S L S"; theoretically, it is possibly to create an infinite number of "remixes" by combining the two pieces in different conjunctions of volume, etc. The mix presented here is only one possibility... and in this mix, the tones from the two individual pieces combine to form NEW tones, thus radically altering the sound and feel of the composition. (If one REALLY wanted to get carried away, consider the possibility of recording different mixes of the two songs combined, then combining THOSE remixes, in an infinite downward spiral leading to the Great Grotto of Tape Hiss....)

The final piece, "Winterbloom Too," works along similar lines, but makes use of the timbres of a bass flute (provided here by Eberhard Blum). It too is staggering in its remix applications... one can only imagine the potential to be realized by combining THIS piece with either or both of the other separate pieces....

And so on. Okay, i'll grant that it's not quite as EXCITING (read: booty-shaking) as, say, Rob Zombie screaming "DEVILMAN, DEVILMAN, SHOUT IT," over and over while his band kicks holes in the walls, but it offers more subtle rewards. And it's plenty LOUD, believe me, plus the ringing tones will really fuck up your inner ear at high volume. DEAD ANGEL approves of ear damage, so this is well worth investigating.

C12: He certainly didn't seem to think much of the Melvins, did he?

TG: Well, given their habit of occasionally releasing pure bullshit just to annoy people, I can understand that. It's wasteful, you know what I mean?

C12: How ironic that this should come from a woman who expends more bullets than the Chinese Red Army.

TG: Right, why don't you fuck off already? (points to the CD player) Cue up the Canadian thing.

C12 (nervously): More Canadians? (disc plays)

TG: Yes, but that's all right. I like Canada. Even if half of them do speak French. Anyhow, this human steamroller of a band is nice and heavy. They get props from the stoners, which is really interesting since their singer sounds like the chick from Romeo Void and their riffs are more new wave than stoner....

C12: Some of this reminds me of Wire.

TG: Check out "D.C." -- listen to those windy-windy corkscrew riffs. They rattle them off like a machine. This is a really precise band. This is a good thing. This doesn't sound like metal at all except for the fact that it's really heavy. They get really interesting guitar sounds.

C12: They sound Sabbath-free. That's what makes them different....

TG: Of course, that lock-step riffing in "Bulldozer" puts them squarely in metal territory, even if they're not aping Sabbath. Is this stuff playing now -- "3-5-1" -- what you're talking about when you say they sound like Wire?

C12: That and "Ring Out." Of course, they're nowhere near as deliberately obscure or inconsistent. 

TG: I like this track "Chronic." It starts out with a weird guitar that sounds more like a tape loop and then everything else comes in together and rolls right over you. I can't get over how precise they are....

C12: They sound like they smoke an immense amount of marijuana and get incredibly fixated on having everything just so. Don't you think?

TG: Could be... could be indeed....

C12: I suppose it's about time for another review from that Sienko lad. Shall we?

TG: Oh yes, certainly. It'll give me time to clean my gun....

Nine Inch Nails -- FURTHER DOWN THE SPIRAL (halo ten v. 1) [Nothing/ Interscope/TVT/Atlantic]

This is kind of interesting... i didn't care all that much for THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL as a whole when it came out, but after listening to this disc of remixes and effluvia (along with the somewhat different UK version -- see below), i went back and listened to it again and appreciate it a lot more. I still prefer many of the versions on this, though. In some cases, the remix here is vastly superior to the original version, particularly in the case of "piggy (nothing can stop me now)," produced here by Rick Rubin, and "the downward spiral (the bottom)," remixed by Coil and transformed into something genuinely scary and disturbing. On "the art of self-destruction (part one)," Trent dispenses with the lyrics and starts from scratch, with a series of wonky noises slowly building to an impenetrable wall of guitars, drums, and assorted weirdness that completely flattens the original; it leads into "... (part two)," which leaves in lyrics but vastly improves the beat. The version of "hurt (quiet)" here is, as the title indicates, quieter than the original but not all that different, actually.

As good as the leading tracks are, though, the real killers come late in the disk, especially in "eraser: denial, realization," which dispenses with everything from the original up to "kill me" wail and mutates into a chugging, churning bludgeonfest; then Aphex Twin gets funky (sort of) with a flanged-out beat and drone piece, "at the heart of it all." Another "self-destruct" remix disintegrates into "the beauty of being numb," which in turn disintegrates into the eerie "erased, over, out," in which a looped fragment of crankcase noise is accompanied by Trent's wail fading in and out, like a tired machine unplugging itself one switch at a time. Mostly interesting stuff, in other words... am i the only one who thinks Trent releases albums just as an excuse to endless remix them? Regardless of whether it's true or not, the results are certainly interesting.

Nine Inch Nails -- FURTHER DOWN THE SPIRAL (halo ten v. 2) [Island/TVT]

The overseas "companion" to the US release, this contains six of the same tracks found on the above disc, plus "self destruction, part three," a live version of "hurt," and different versions of "heresy" and "ruiner." The otherwise unavailable third part to "self destruct" is the one that most closely resembles the original (although it's still pretty chopped up), while the version of "heresy" is interesting, placing less emphasis on the lyrics and beefing up the background rhythm. No doubt everybody in the free world has heard the live version of "hurt" found here, since MTV's now played it to death (why were they playing a track that's not even supposed to be available in the US? i still haven't figured that one out), so it's on to "ruiner (version)," which isn't better or worse than the original, just... different. It's hard to say which version of the disc is "better"; what would have been preferable would have been to include ALL the tracks on one disc, but then it would have been 90 minutes long. So... pick up the US version (bargain-priced!) and if you groove on it, hunt this down too.

My, but this one is a mouthful. Two CDs, 23 songs, a ridiculous number of minutes, and more angst than you can shake a syringe at... too much of a good thing, perhaps?

Perhaps, but then, excess has always been the entire point of NIN, hasn't it? And certainly this is a far more stylish platter of excess than his previous output. Some critics have been dissing this double-disc on the grounds that it's just more of the same, and there's a smidge o' fairness to this accusation... but i think it would be more accurate to say that this is the first NIN outing to finally get everything right. From a sheer sonic perspective, this is the album to beat now where "state of the art" is concerned. From the sheer genius of song sequencing (dig that segue from the ridiculously lush "The Day the World Went Away" into the quietly baroque piano bit of "The Frail," which in turn leads into the ominous death-chug of "The Wretched") to the vast panorama of sounds and textures to the largely high caliber of song quality (this is by far the most consistent batch of ravings Reznor has coughed up yet), the set largely succeeds in capturing Reznor's admittedly grandiose vision. Certainly, Reznor has never been better at mixing machine and man-made sounds; there are apparently live drums all over the place plus the usual drum machines, but you'll never be able to figure out which are which. Ditto for the sounds, some of which sound genuinely mutant... although unlike on previous discs, the mutant sounds are generally incorporated into the songwriting rather than standing out as entities unto themselves. And it's nice to see that for all his moves into baroque, semi-classical "art," he's still fully capable of descending into full-tilt berserker mode (witness the tail end of "We're In This Together" and "No, You Don't," where he piles on everything like a giant sonic avalanche).

Most reviews i've read of the set so far have opined that the first disc is the "uncommercial" one and the second the "uncommercial" one (or vice versa), but this is poo-poo -- the bigger truth is that the cuts destined to be singles are linked together by odder and often more interesting pieces, a formula that largely holds true for both discs. Interestingly, the linking cuts (generally the quieter ones, although even that is not always true -- scope out "Just Like You Imagined," which starts off with tinkly fey piano and winds up in an avalanche of lurching beats, cyclotron keyboards, and crunch-guitars) tend to feature a lot of piano... there's a lot of piano on this album, which is good, because Trent plays cool piano bits. One of the more interesting non-singles is "Pilgrimage," an efx-laden trudgefest that sounds like it could have come from Coil's HORSE ROTORVATOR. "La Mer" is another intriguing one -- it starts out as a tinkly piano ballad and just when it's starting to get twee, Reznor drops in some deranged beats and turns up the dronotron, and it really starts to swing in a jazz soundtrack sorta way.

Another thing to like about the album is Trent's growing fascination with tripped-out beats -- he must be listening to a lot o' trip-hop and jungle, because convoluted beats are everywhere, especially on "Even Deeper." Boss jungle beats are the only thing that save "Starfuckers, Inc." (a thinly-veiled swipe at former pal Marilyn Manson) from being utterly tedious (although it sounds brilliant, mind you; lots o' snazzy production tricks at work, not that they can save the song from its general pettiness). The biggest and baddest beats, though, come back to back on my favorite two tracks, both on the second disc -- "Into the Void," which (Sabbath title notwithstanding) is the closest this album comes to the "classic" NIN sound, and "Where Is Everybody?," which alternates long stretches of plod-funk with loopy breaks while Reznor rants over doom-laden keyboards. It is true that the second disc appears to run out of steam as it goes -- but given the title and wonked-out disintegration of the final track, "Ripe (With Decay)," i'm inclined to think that may well be intentional. I think it's definitely true that as with Pink Floyd's THE WALL -- the obvious inspiration here -- the album makes more sense, conceptually, if you listen to it all straight through in one sitting.

Trivia note: If the sprawling double-disc thing reminds you of Pink Floyd's THE WALL, that's probably not accidental -- among other things, the song sequencing was mapped out by Bob Ezrin, the guy who did the exact same thing for Pink Floyd on THE WALL. (I think he's more successful here, incidentally. Say what you will about Reznor, but he has far more musical range than Pink Floyd ever did... and i like Pink Floyd.)

Um, was there a point to this? Did we really need three more versions of "Starfuckers, Inc.," which wasn't even remotely the best song on THE FRAGILE to begin with? Uh.... okay.... So we got with what we got, that's the plan. Uh huh. Yessir. And what we have is stripped-down versions of some of the ornate songs from the double-album plus one new one, a cover of Gary Numan's "metal" and another version of "10 miles high," originally available on one of the CD-singles. I'll tell you right now, this is not an indispensable item -- there's absolutely no good, compelling reason to fork over $$$ for this unless you're really hep on NIN. Or unless you have a burning desire to hear what portions of THE FRAGILE would sound like as overly hyperactive drum 'n bass/jungle tunes. Now, some of you may in fact desire such a thing -- particularly if you thought the double-album was just a bit over the top and a wee bit too "layered" in its production -- but i liked the original just fine and, unlike on most of his other remix albums, most of these remixes don't even remotely approach the interest level of the original tracks, much less surpass them. (I actually thought the remixes from THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL were better, in most cases, than the original material; i definitely don't think that here.)

Which is not to say that this is a complete waste of time -- "the great collapse" (which i'm assuming is a radical remix of "the great below") is hard as hell and wipes the floor with the rest of the disc, pretty much; it opens with portions of the original and abruptly segues into a lurching mechanical riff and a monstrous beat that pretty much command you to get up and do the robot. The version of "the wretched" here isn't bad either -- it has some pretty thunderous moments -- and the cover of "metal" does indeed evoke the spirit of Gary Numan. The version of "10 miles high" here is probably better than the one on the CD-single, too, which doesn't hurt. But the rest of it... eeeehhh, i dunno mon. Trent's swing is starting to get a tad rusty....

And you thought perhaps Trent had gone away. But no, he's been there all this time, birthing the two-disc monstrosity that is THE FRAGILE, tentatively scheduled to be released in September. And he must be close, because here comes the teaser -- a three-track CD-single (kind of skimpy for him, actually; previous NIN singles have been crammed full o' extra goodies... a new marketing strategy, perhaps?). Two are tracks from the forthcoming album, and one is an unnecessary remix of the title track. Upon listening to the album, it appears (from this evidence, at least) that the forthcoming set is nowhere near as radically different from previous NIN outings as some have suggested... but there are some differences. The title track, for instance, borrows heavily from mid-period Swans (check out those massive keyboards, mon, and the whole slowpoke feel... outside of the scorched earth guitars, this could easily have come from one of the Swans albums circa THE GREAT ANNIHILATOR), but screws the structure on backwards, something that's a bit new for Trent. He's working the quiet/loud axis here, all right, shades o' Nirvana, but putting the juxtapositions in odd places, trying to catch you off balance. "Starfuckers, Inc." is even bolder (sort of) -- a crafty foray into jungle beats (!), something he does well, although it's balanced out with the now predictable avalanche o' guitars on the chorus and marred, as are many of Trent's songs, but tremendously narcissistic/infantile lyrics. Perhaps he should give up on the lyrics and just go ahead and release a flat-out jungle/noise album; that would be amusing. If we're lucky there's more stuff like this on the album. The "quiet" mix of the title track is just annoying, although about halfway through it gets interesting, but by that time 90% of the listeners will have given up on it....

Give the devil his due, mon -- this is one boss-sounding live set. Trent may be all about recycling in a big way, but at least it sounds good.... In typical NIN fashion, this document of the Fragility v. 2.0 tour is available in more than one version: the one i have is the deluxe big-deal comes-in-a-fancy-ass-slipcase double-disc thingy with the official live album on one disc and a bunch of, uhhhhh, other stuff on the second one. You can also buy the live disc alone (in different packaging, natch), or the extra disc alone in different packaging (it's called STILL, btw -- not content to recycle his own synth-jizz, he's gotta be recycling Joy Division titles too), or both discs separately, or both discs AND this one if you're a filthy fucking completist (i'm gonna stick with just this one, thank you). Just call NIN and Interscope the masters of marketing and oversaturation, eh?

So anyway, we got these here discs and they have, like, music on them. Lots of it. Not too heavy on the latest-album tip (THE FRAGILE, remember? you know, the double-disc that sank like a stone?), and for some totally inexplicable reason they've forsaken the best stuff from that set (figures), but at least they have all the other big-deal tunes from the previous albums, so it all works out in the end. Best news (on the live disc, anyway) is that they've stripped away a lot of the synth-cheese that makes some of the earlier stuff so hard to listen to now and replaced it with thundering drums and pounding bass and fat-ass guitar. Yah, there's still some cheesy sounds in the mix, but they're largely drowned out by the seismic pound so you can ignore them if you're so inclined. Nearly everything is reworked to one degree or another -- even live the Prince o' Gloom can't stop tinkering -- and the tracks from the debut disc really benefit from this: "Terrible Lie" and "Head Like A Hole" sound far more intensely forbidding here than on PRETTY HATE MACHINE, and "Sin" is actually listenable here. "The Wretched" sounds every bit as boss live as i always figured it would, and older stuff like "Suck" and "March of the Pigs" are either so radically reworked as to become new songs or vastly improved in the sonic department.. So the live disc is definitely worth picking up, especially if you thought a double-album followed by a bunch of cd-single remixes and deconstructions (most of them nothing to write home about, either) were kind of a waste o' $$$. This will give you the fix you need for considerably less folding granola.

Which brings us to the second disc, a bit of a sticky widget -- is it live, it is remixes, did they go back and record all this stuff from the ground up, or what? Who the fuck knows? Out of nine songs, five are new -- "Adrift and at Peace," "Gone, Still," "And All That Could Have Been," "The Persistence of Loss," and "Leaving Hope" -- and they all sound like outtakes from THE FRAGILE, pretty much. I like the way all of these songs have been rejiggered to spotlight Massuh Reznor's not-too-shabby ivory-ticklin' skills, and the hinky-pinky dinky-dau reworking of "The Becoming" is pretty swell, but overall none of the new stuff really jumps out and screams "worship me you fool!" and just how many times do you need to hear the boyz redo these tunes, anyway? My advice: grok the live album separately if you're not one of the hardcore, get the double-set if you just gotta hear every bleating fart Trent's ever committed to tape. The disc isn't bad at all (and all of this is really, really well-recorded), just be prepared for it to be less than earth-shattering....

Nisi Period -- SOON THE LOVE BALLOON WILL POP [RRRecords]

Hmmm... I have been MISLED. I picked this up when I saw it at 33 Degrees after hunting for it for a long time, mainly because I'd read a tiny squib in some ancient Subterranean catalog that compared it favorably to the Pain Teens. But when I got it home, it didn't sound ANYTHING like the Pain Teens (well, maybe the last song "Unless" did, sort of). Instead, it sounds like a more controlled and less shamanistic version of Crash Worship crossed with a poppier and less feedback-oriented version of Band of Susans, or maybe even Rhys Chatham. Which is interesting enough to allow me to forgive Subterranean for their misleading purchase inducement....

Basically, this album was released in 1992 and appears to be their only release (of course -- it's brilliant, so OF COURSE they never released anything else, which vastly overrated "artists" like Sonic Youth have released more vinyl than ever should have been allowed), and is the work of six guys (no idea who does what, since it's not listed), and it's cool stuff. Lots of hypnotic tribal-style drumming offset by distorto-pop guitars on one side and chime-chime guitars on the other, with bizarre lyrics in the middle. Somehow it's not inappropriate that they came from Boston, although why this should be so logical escapes me at the moment. No matter; the album crushes, so what do you care where they came from, eh?

The best stuff happens in "Echo of Suggestion" and "Motion of Complexity," where thundering tribal drums compete with big, chiming power chords and slow, percolating basslines to form truly hypnotic body rock. (Meaning you can shake your butt to it, ok?) The weirdest tracks would have to be "Notes from the Underground" (with lyrics like "I believe there is something wrong with this liver! MY liver! However, I don't know a damn thing about this liver! MY liver!") and the almost-ambient "Unless," which sounds like the bizarre offspring of Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" and a drunken Skullflower jam; the rest of it falls somewhere between these two extremes, but is nevertheless pretty damn swell. Oh, and "Treat Her Like A Sailor" has some nifty guitar effects happening in it too, most swank. I nominate them for posthumous godhead. Now go hunt the damn thing down.

This is what country music would sound like now if Nashville hadn't so thoroughly polluted it -- country by way of X or the Violent Femmes, or maybe a more tuneful (and less willfully obscure) Jandek. This is the music of the dark, spooky hill country after dark -- steeped in Southern gothic and occasionally even menacing, but still tuneful 'n melodic enough to keep you from bolting from the porch. They are intense, but they do not spook the horse.... I gather this is alt-country, but there's plenty of drone here too, and the slow, deliberate pace of their songs, just like all the best country death tunes, make them relentless and implacable. They share the Black Heart Procession's fondness for moments of atonal wailing in spooky fascination between (and occasionally during) the actual tunes, if not that band's forbidding and utterly otherworldly vibe, but their songs are more traditional otherwise, and their more melodious harmony vocals will be far more appealing to most. This is country music that has absolutely nothing to do with the current "state of the art" that passes for Nashville's version of the country sound. Anybody who has any question why i'd vastly prefer this over hideous mainstream country spoo like the Dixie Chicks should hear this for themselves and see if they can figure out why.

Pounding, subterranean hell filth from some dudes in Norway on bass, drums, and... and... viola? I am struck dumb with confusion.... They're clearly from the same no-wave / skronk axis that has generated bands like Locust, Arab on Radar, Pink and Brown, and Lightning Bolt, but because they're from Norway everything sounds eccentric and very much the noisy product of people whose ideas on tone are largely influenced by the grim and ravishing evil of black metal. Interesting liner notes come courtesy of one Stefan Jaworzyn, formerly of Skullflower, currently of Ascension, and his words indicate that he worships Billy Anderson (big-deal producer of godz like Bottom, Sleep, Acid King, etc.), who produced this fine opus. He also says nice things about the disc, so this can only be seen as a good sign, right?

As it turns out, the viola makes a nice contrast to the hocus-pocus drums and insanely heavy leviathan bass quake. As tracks like "Mek It Burn" and "Cupid Shot Me" make it clear, they're absurdly entranced with harsh, dissonant tones and crazed, repetitive mechanical-man riffs. The growling bass of death in songs like "Pantyland" is straight out of early Skullflower, too, even if the riffs and spastic lurching-about are definitely closer to the crazed ravings of the NYC no-wave crowd. "Swarm" has plenty of whining atonal guitar swirling around a crunge-bass and a devolved quasi-funk beat; "Web of Sin" is a swell collection of shrieks, drones, sawtooth hypno-guitar, and fog-inducing bass shake over an unyielding beat. Much of the time the viola assumes the role a guitar would normally have in such trios, and at other times they're just all fucked-up and freaking out, so it doesn't matter anyway. All of these songs are played with maximum annoyance potential to normal humans -- your mother, your girlfriend, and your co-workers will tell you to turn that horrible shit off, and you will pity them because they are so small and insignificant, with minds like the dim misfiring neurons of a feeble cricket on DDT, and thus fail to understand the genius of such sounds, such primal windows to the stoned iconoclast's psyche. You'll also continue playing this stylin' album, if you're wise, at least until one of the aforementioned annoyed humans takes an axe to your stereo.

The postal maggots must not like Noxagt; they busted up my cd case pretty bad. Damaged the tray liner (wah!) and now there's little pieces of plastic falling everywhere... the postal maggots better hope the Devil Kitty doesn't choke on one, nu? Not that it matters -- Stefan Jaworzyn (you know, that cat from Skullflower and Ascension and SHOCK and blah blah blah) must like them, because he wrote a whole pack of entertaining lies about them in the liner notes to accompany the pix of them looking like normal (well, if you squint) human beings. Billy Anderson (producer of the stoner / doom godz) must like them too, because he agreed to twiddle the dials in the recording of this bizarre outing. The album itself is a lot of frantic quasi-jazz noise pounding, like the unholy union of Skullflower and Gore (the Holland art-damaged metal band, not the Brazilian gore band), only made by guys from Norway with names that are severely lacking in vowels. The riffs are weird and atonal and heavy and most disturbed, so of course a lot of people are going to going to compare them to the Melvins (even the poop sheet does, and they should know, right?), but I think these guys are really building off a fanatical devotion to heavy European art-rock, Krautrock, and purely weird experimental noise in general. As a result, their heavy mojo is largely free of a lot of the influences that keep showing up in American bands kicking sand around this particular ballpark, which automatically makes them a lot more invigorating and fresh-sounding. It also makes them considerably less prone to riff and noise cliches (or maybe they're Norwegian cliches, but that's okay, I'm not Norwegian and neither are you, probably, so neither of us will ever know the difference). Besides, they have a song called "Naked in France." How can you go wrong with titles like "Naked in France"?

Their sound can be really souped-up and vicious, like a mechanical scouring pad set on VAPORIZE (see "A Blast From the Past," "Blood Thing," "Svartevatn"), but it can be a lot of other things as well, like hypnotic and mantra-like ("Acasta Gneiss"). One of the interesting things about the band is their instrumentation, which has a lot to do with their different sound -- three guys playing bass / baritone guitar, viola / violin / piano, and drums / percussion tend to have lots of opportunity for droning and pulsing, but you'd be surprised how much noise they can generate, too. (Thanks to Billy's swank-as-fuck production job, this teeming pile o' complex throb is not only loud but clear, especially where the drums are concerned.) The structure and dynamics of the slow and minimalist "Thurmaston" are nice, as are the fizzy drones, minimalist percussion, and jazzy chords of "Regions of May" (a cover, I gather, but of who I know not). The album is instrumental except for one track, "Kling No Klokka," apparently sung (and in quite arresting fashion, at that) by the viola player's grandfather. Imagine the energy and hyperactive guitar skills of your average Load band married to European classicism with roots in noise and jazz. That's the source of power here in a nutshell -- while they share a certain energy and imagination with other noise-rock bands, their firm grasp of musical styles beyond the pale of punk, metal, and noise gives them a level of sophistication that's a pleasure to behold. Finally, a band capable of appealing to both Yes and Metallica fans, which should make for a really interesting mix at the shows....

The name's appropriate enough -- glitch electronic moves sometimes obscure the industrial roots of primary sonic architect Chris Stepniewski, but there's plenty of noise and hard pounding for the freak in you. The processed vox don't particularly draw attention to themselves (which is probably just as well, since the lyrics are somewhere in the "so stupid I am actually wise" zen territory that gave birth to the lyrical excesses of Motley Crue's SHOUT AT THE DEVIL and anything by Monster Magnet, ever), but the sound is plenty pounding in the right places, and the lyrics are beside the point anyway. The ambience and approach to samples at times reminds me very much of the excellent (if unfairly obscure) Masochistic Religion (and where are they now, anyway)? Not as terrifying as the promo thingy would like to have you believe (unless you think Nine In Nails is "scary," perhaps), but still possessed of some punishing grooves and satisfying moments of old-school industrial stylings. Expect only misanthropic thoughts in this dark cave, where the dance floor swims under an inch or two of blood. Your body will rock whether you want it to or not. Bonus points for the dark taste in samples and moments of pure pounding fury.

I'm not sure exactly what's up here, but what we have on this cassette are a collection of individuals conducting peculiar experimentals in tuneful dub -- in other words, lots o' bass action happening here. Occasionally vox float up in the mix, but for the most part the rhythm is king, and most tubby, even springy. And while there aren't 400 dubs after all -- only 25, actually -- there's still plenty of variety to the dubs in question. Guitars, keyboards, weird percussion, and peculiar sound efx (often drowned in delay and reverb) get inserted into the mix from time to time, just to keep things hopping... and meanwhile, the bass bloops along and the beat remains solid. To attempt to dissect 25 dub tunes would be an act of folly; let me just summarize the contents by saying that this is not straightforward Jamaican dub by any means, nor is it the wonked-out nightmarish hellstuff so familiar to devotees of Ice and Techno-Animal. Rather, it's dub filtered through goth/dreampop sensibility, if you can hang with that... goth for the 4AD crowd, in other words. And while i'm sure that sounds bizarre, it's certainly listenable, even tasty. Fun stuff that sounds like the product of musicians with talent farting around in the studio just for fun (as opposed to talentless musicians farting around and producing sludge), with no preconceived notions or agendas attached...just the urge to move the booty machine. Toasters should investigate.

Another all-girl punk band from the east, three of them this time, Seoul girls with a taste for Oi punk. I have absolutely no idea what any of it's about since it's in Korean (the lyrics are helpfully printed in both Korean and Japanese, though). The titles are in English, and they appear to be all standard-issue Oi sentiments ("Let's Fight!!!," "No Way," "Fuck Shit Up," "Trouble Maker," "So Cocky," etc.), but the graphics on the Korean side of the insert are the most hysterically brilliant thing i've ever seen -- a wild variety of cartoons of screaming punks, Buddha with a mohawk, wild dogs, cavemen, robots, and more leap out at you. (I really like the illustration for "Spilt Milk," a cartoon girl with curls kneeling beside a cup of spilt milk... the one for "Trouble Maker," with its man vs. chicken theme, is pretty amusing too.) The music is exactly what they claim -- straight-ahead, driving Oi punk. They have the melodic sensibility to keep it interesting (Unson's shouting and wild Oi ranting are pretty entertaining in their own right), but they stick so closely to the Oi standard for the most part that they may wear thin early on for not so hep on Oi. Anybody who is down with Oi tunes, though, ought to definitely like this. I even like it when they mosh, which i normally can't stand, so they must know what they're doing, eh? Their style of Oi often reminds me of AC/DC's first album (they're certainly heavy enough), the one the band made before they'd been fully weaned from their Oi roots, and this is definitely a good thing. Recommended, especially if you like gathering with like-minded individuals to jump up and down shouting "Oi! Oi! Oi!" on a regular basis.

This is a totally insane idea: a bunch o' dope-huffin' Japanese boyz weaned on equal doses of Pink Floyd and Brutal Truth emerge from a weed fog with the "brilliant" idea of fusing the two extremes. Psychedelic grindcore. Uh huh. Now i know the apocalypse is upon us. This debut album appears before the dazed American public courtesy of Richard Hoak, Deaf American uberhoncho and former drummer for Brutal Truth (he also helped produce the evil mother), and it's a scary, jarring debut. They're equally adept at psychedelic doodling as they are at barking and grinding, so what you get most of the time is abrupt shifts between the two extremes, followed by passages of both extremes waffling away at once, like two stereos battling. It's an extremely disorienting sound, to say the least, ha! It's really bizarre to listen to a song like "never see the sunbeam, my son," which opens with early-Floydian pastoral space doodling, only to barrel right into grinding death spasms, which is then followed by grindcore fluffed out with hallucinogenic guitar doodlings. As with most Japanese bands, they have their shit down to a science, which means that when they start grinding at high speed on "dislocated," the psych guitarist is able to punctuate the blast beats with crazed psych jazz filth like a drill sergeant weaned on precision. Stoned they may be, but sloppy they are not, which actually puts their science up on par with deathjazz -- there are moments on the disc that approach the kinetic overkill of Zorn and Painkiller, actually, although it's a far more controlled display of frenzy. My personal fave here is "breed the freak," which shifts back and forth from mid-tempo to grind speed and is sort of like a hideously mutant variation on swing jazz with dripping psychedelic viscera smeared all over the squirming body on the operating table.

Where they really start dropping psych science in a big way, though, is on the epic, multi-part opus "any green here," which takes up half the album and is divided into five wildly varying parts. The opening movement, "planetary cradle," is pure prettified psych tripping, and good stuff at that; these guys could be bona-fide psych godz if they felt like it. Then they drop in a squealing, acid-drenched guitar solo here and there, and you can just see the bongs being lifted across the nation, maaaaan... (huff, huff).... and eventually the grindcore section, "ares (the rise and fall of)" kicks in, more like spastic deathjazz than true grindcore. That finally segues into a bleeping, squawking noise section, "radioactive wipe-out," before returning to stoned-hippie psych moves again during "a few rays of hope." This eventually gives way to the combined attack of slo-mo grindcore death rattle moves and shouting and full-on psych solo doodling during the closing movement "earthrise," and a fine mess o' tuneage it is. Rich Hoak gets bonus points for having balls big enough to put out such a schizoid release, and it's definitely worthy o' your dollars in a big way. One of the most unexpected and welcome surprises to come my way in quite some time.

Nosebleed Satori -- DEPRESSIVE EPISODE [Corprolith]

First off, i'm not certain about the title: It's either DEPRESSIVE EPISODE or LEADEN ARABESQUE, depending on how you interpret the packaging. Either way, it's very loud and obnoxious. As with most noise releases, it's hard for me to tell where one thing stops and another begins, so here are some of the titles... make of them what you will: "Dead Reckoning," "Factory on Fire," "Leaden Arabesque," "Vomit Can Melt Snow," "Taxonomy," "Aqua Vulva," "Inivisible Construction # 1," etc., etc. One "track" is actually two -- "Ha-Hanistaroth" on the left channel, "Disposable" on the right, both running simultaneously. Some techniques at work throughout the tape: bursts of noise taken from various heavily processed sources as hum fades in and out; walls of stuttering, chopped-up sound; sound that cycles from channel to channel; ambient hum that sweeps in and out of focus; human voices processed and destroyed; more damaged experimental sounds. The overall intent is not so much to be full-on and ear-damaging as the more brutal noise artists, but to rattle your consciousness with the unexpected. For that purpose, it succeeds well, although it might be a bit too "ambient" in places for the severe noisehead (or maybe not; the hum and rumble sounds pretty fearsome in its own right if you turn it up loud enough). Get creative with the EQ and no telling what results you might come up with....

Nosebleed Satori -- THE WHEEL AND THE RACK [Corprolith]

Interesting stuff here -- extremely RHYTHMIC sheets of noise; a nice change of pace from the usual formless flying shards o' filth approach favored by 90% of the noisemeisters. (Not that the flying death wedge attach manuever is BAD, mind you, just that it's good to hear something completely DIFFERENT every once in a while). Billed as "ritual noise for mechanical possession," this certainly has the mechanical part down cold -- crapped- out noises are grouped in units and move in machinelike rhythms, like slaves being forced to constantly turn a great wheel of noise, especially on "Great Pain of Being." This is followed by a "clean hands dub" of the same, then two versions of "Ritual Deviance," but honestly, i couldn't really tell where one ended and the next one started -- it's just one long side of repetitive grinding and trancelike noise chopped into four movements, okay? The titles do not matter... the SOUND is the key... and the sound is gruesome, so it is GOOD.

Expect more of the same on the second side -- "Evil Men Have No Songs" and "What's Happening to My Coins?" (at least i THINK those are the two tracks on this side... like i say, it's hard to tell where one thing stops and other begins) take the concept of heavily repetitive noise to even further excesses. This is the kind of thing that will either piss you off in a hurry or make you curious about where it's all coming from. Certainly there are many nice, bass-heavy sounds happening here, a neglected area in the current craze for high-pitching drilling noises. The only complaint i have is that some of the songs might be a bit TOO long -- it might be better to break them down into more digestible pieces -- but then my own band is notorious for doing 25-minute drone epics, so i've got no business talking about length considerations, eh? Regardless, the tape is a most interesting deviation from the usual noise path, worth investigating....

Not Breathing -- EVENT HORIZON [???]

Finally, a techno album that doesn't sound like a million other techno albums -- good deal! Nice, thick 12" vinyl with four long songs. Favorite would have to be the first one, "Cloud Modulation," which starts off with HEAVILY reverbed pinging noises, like water molecules bouncing around in the stratosphere, then starts gradually adding elements one layer at a time until the backbeat kicks in, followed by more pinging and chirping, then the REAL beat starts to work its demon juju on your booty....

With "Airborne Jellyfish" we get... a twisted twinkly noise thing, like Null gone techno (?!?!?!). I can already hear the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth of the noizehead purists over this one, but too bad, it grooves... and once it gets cranked up, it's got a pretty cortex-blinding beat as well -- Wash that technotronic blotter acid down with EVERCLEAR!

"Fourth Plane Drifter" has a pretty severe noise hum weighing it down (which led me to check my stereo quite often, worried about its origin until it dawned me that it was SUPPOSED to be there), over which the techno beats and bleats and chirps get laid down until it's all bouncing around like grease on a hot skillet. As with the others, it's interesting (and for the genre, kind of unusual) that the beat takes a while to get going -- but since the hum is looped and has a beat of its own, that's no problem. Hum you can dance to! The last track, "Rotorhead Discovers H2O," isn't quite as brilliant as the other three -- slipping a little bit toward a bit more "traditional" techno -- but it's still miles better than most of the techno i've heard so far.

And this is only a test pressing -- no telling how much better the REAL thing will sound... but since the label stamp was all smudgy, boo hoo, i can't say what label it's on, so to learn that useful info you'll have to contact Not Breathing at atlantis23@aol.com. Ask him about the plans for the artwork while you're at it, the cover promises to be amusing....

Not Breathing -- s/t [self-released]

Imagine this... now that Not Breathing is signed to Invisible, they're still putting out hand-crafted, hand-dubbed tapes of otherwise (as far as i know) unrleased material. Oooo, cool! All this stuff was released as of May 1996 (should that have been 1997?), so some or all of it may have come out elsewhere (as you can tell, i haven't seen or heard the new CD). Regardless of its availability, this is happening shit. "Revlon Sky" has an endless looped beat like pygmies playing mallets on your skull with lots of synth drone and quirky noises layered over the top. "Human to Amphibian Evolutionary Primer" is essentially beatless, cascading volleys of slo-mo underwater sounds; more underwater sounds get mixed with chugging busted-CD riffing on "Poseidon Rising." The water/no beats theme appears again in "20,000 Leagues," with equally spacy effects.... The beat (a heavy one!) returns in "Toxic Rotorhead," then it's time for more underwater burbling for the next couple of tunes. Overall, this is an unusually ambient, low- key outing for NB... which probably explains why it's being released in this fashion and not via Invisible. (I suspect the CD is, shall we say, heavier and more beat-oriented. But i could be wrong. But i doubt it.)

Wow, this is even MORE cryptic than the Melt-Banana single! The record itself is nifty blue vinyl with no label, and thus no clue as to which side is which; inside the sleeve (adorned by colorful abstract artwork), the sides are labeled 23 and CHAOS. As for the sound, file under ambient/techno. The track I presume to be "Atlantis" features lots of watery sounds, a bit in the vein of Aube; the flip side actually has beats and the appearance of digeridoo. Since techno is not even remotely my specialty, I don't know if this stands out from the crowd or not, but I like it. Techno enthusiasts should check this out....

More sonic experimentation from Japan's foremost guitar workaholic. This time he's making funny noises with Jim O'Rourke, the guitar experimentalist in his own right known mostly for his work with Illusion of Safety. The two of them together make some pretty strange sounds, as this disc proves. Their guitars are the only instruments on the album, but as it turns out, that's more than enough to fill up every available space with an open, droning wall of sound.

The album opens quietly with "Abyss," an eerie track that sounds like it was recorded on a raft in the middle of the ocean with a cataclysmic storm looming over the horizon. Driven by piercing harmonics and reverberating bass swirls that ebb and flow like the tide, it's easily the most ambient of all the work here.

Things start getting noisier in a hurry, quickly reaching the first of many peaks on "Live at Lounge Axe Part 1," taken from a live performance at (you'll never guess) the Lounge Axe club in Chicago of 8/8/92. Before the track is over, the guitars are buzzing, shrieking, and generally emitting some of the most harrowing noises you'll ever hear outside of a Masonna record. Fabulous.

The sound drops into a quieter groove again on "Septic Moon," a sonic bookend to the opening track, and one in which Null's early-era Pink Floyd fetish creeps forward. "Neuro Geometry" lulls you even further in sleepy submission before the howling guitars of "Live at Lounge Axe Part 2" stomp you wide awake again; eventually the howl gives way to the sound of noise hell, in which the guitars sound like they're tumbling down an endless flight of stairs with the amps turned all the way up. "Operation DNA" ends the excursions into six-string ambience on a slightly more placid note, although the piercing harmonics are just as unsettling and paint-peeling as on previous tracks.

For anyone unfamiliar with the work of either artist, this is an excellent place to start; ambient enthusiasts in search of a harder edge will also find much here to enjoy.

K. K. Null -- ABSOLUTE HEAVEN [Charnel Music]

The latest installment of the Null CD-of-the-Month Club brings us more exquisite pain and pleasure. There are only three pieces here, all solo works recorded from 1991 to 1993 -- two short ones that serve as bookends to the incredibly long one in the middle that makes up the vast bulk of the CD. Nothing happening here but a man and his guitar (and approximately one effects box for every person in Tokyo), but that's more than enough, as usual. What Null does with a guitar and some gadgets is scary enough without needing to drag in drummers or singers or anything like that....

"Part I" opens things up with screeching, almost symphonic guitars that loosely approximate the sound of a constellation squeezed into a netal box and made to resonate like a tuning fork. There's so much high end here that at high volume, it'll probably strip-mine your ears; we're talking serious damage... and yet it's both eerie and beautiful, and commands your attention even while your ears beg for mercy.

"Part II" is a long, long (36:15) suite of guitars that scream and vibrate while unidentifiable sounds streak in and out of the picture with cold, unnerving fury. You can feel the cold vacuum of space, feel the ship hurtling through the cosmos, shuttling past planets and stars and into the darkest corner of the universe. If celestial bodies could sing, they would sound like this.

"Part III" ends with more interstellar overdrive, drenched in echo and layered parts that sound as if they were processed through a daisy chain of delay pedals. Somewhere at the edge of the universe, beyond the wall of sleep, a planet is being born and a star is dying, and this is the sound they make. Cosmic bliss never sounded so essential.

K. K. Null -- ULTIMATE MATERIAL II [Fourth Dimension]

This records offers up an interesting quandry: It's an excellent place to start for the Null neophyte, since it basically touches on all the different forms he's explored over his solo career all in one package (a gatefold double-LP with stunning art); but unfortunately, it's on a really obscure label out of England, which means that only the dedicated will probably ever have a hope of finding it. Damn... maybe somebody with a higher profile should license it and distribute it in the US or something.... This album set certainly deserves to be heard.

This is the middle segment, so to speak, of Null's ULTIMATE MATERIAL series (the first, SAISHYU BUSHITSU, is available on Forced Exposure and the latest one, ULTIMATE MATERIAL III, is out on Manifold), and it's a lot more varied than the other two, which are essentially forays into total guitar annihilation. That's represented here on "Ultimate Material II," where screeching wind-tunnel guitars battle with hyperkinetic auto-crash sounds and God only knows what else in a huge meta-stew that often resembles the sound planets must make when they're being born. By contrast, "Heaven's Breath" -- fueled by delay-doubled (and tripled) guitars and soft bass washes -- more resembles the output of Final or Null's more ambient excursions; this wouldn't have been out of place on A NEW KIND OF WATER or AURORA. Quiet, hypnotic, oddly relaxing... mondo.

"Metabolic Tanz" moves from ambient to psychadelic, with spacy UFO sounds twittering in and out of a slow-churn rumble, guitars that circle and radiate like magnetic lines creating ripples in cold water... think of the Table of Elements singles and, to a lesser degree, ABSOLUTE HEAVEN and you've stumbled into the right ballpark. The churn gets heavier and the sound gets thicker as it goes, until it's eventually enveloped in titanic sheets of whirling noise. "Mineral/Mirage" has droning guitars that spiral up, up, up before sweeping back down and more outer-space sounds... or is that inner space? Perhaps it's both. Whichever, as with "Metabolic Tanz," it gets thicker and denser as the grooves wear on, until you're utterly engulfed. "Drawnus" ends it all with more ambient string-twanging, droning, ethereal emptiness.

This is one of the most focused, consistent releases Null's ever put out, and the art -- disturbing bonescapes painted by artist Raita Ishikawa -- is just stunning; it's almost worth picking up the album for the art alone. If you like Null already or have the interest but don't where to begin and you happen to see this, snag it while you can.

K. K. Null -- ULTIMATE MATERIAL III [Manifold]

Ahhh... YES... the sound... the fury... the tortured wail of rhinos from the gas clouds of Neptune being savagely castrated with pruning shears... screech owls with dead hollow eyes spontaneously combusting as they hurtle through a wind tunnel stretching from the sun straight to hell, their tiny irradiated bones forming a grotesque funeral procession... aaaieeee! the guitar roars! it shakes itself apart! it makes horrible squealing noises like a pig in heat! it sound obnoxious! it goes on for an HOUR!

Yes... Null RETURNS.... and he's feeling cranky.

This sounds sort of like the basic SOUND of his first album (a harsh, scraping noisefest) or early A.N.P. being filtered through the cosmic space-drone thing he's been mining over the past few EPs and singles... kind of like all of those were a dry run for this final masterpiece, the Ultimate Juggernaut. This is where it all comes together -- he combines the chaotic noise of the early years with the weird psychadelic space-freak moves of ABSOLUTE HEAVEN and the chatter-drone of everything since to come up with an hour (in two segments) of what sounds like a dead sun being sucked through a straw and reassembled into a screaming gas giant on the other side. The man is a god. Makes me wonder what the double-LP ULTIMATE MATERIAL I and II sounds like....

K.K. Null -- GUITAR ORGANISM [Charnel Music / Nux Organization]

There's some mighty strange noises lurking on THIS one! Not content to ruin the world's collective hearing through his own solo work and recordings with Zeni Geva, now Null has come up with this disc -- six collaborative efforts that point him in a new direction. (Dunno how long it'll LAST, but it's a new one, anyway.) Three of the songs here were done in conjunction with Ichiro Agata (guitarist for Space Streakings); "Double Headed Jet Pimento" features Null in the background (i think) unleashing slow gonglike chords as Agata mades squeaking, twitching noises, sounding both ambient and twisted at the same time. I think this is what Null and Co. were aiming for on the Yona-Kit CD (but never quite got there). Interesting bell-like sounds add to the mix before it all fades out. On "Love Isn't Blind," the insect noises continue, this time over a wash of tidal guitar sounds, in an appealing variation of the same general idea. The trilogy of sorts is completed with "Oriental Psycho Garden," where the Agata's skittering, squealy guitar is matched by more exotic/tasteful sounds from Null's guitar. Kind of like Arabic music being played someone in the throes of demonic possession, maybe....

The duet with Fred Frith, "Where We Exist," is a bit noisier and closer in style to early A.N.P. material, only not quite so histronic. Not bad, but a bit shapeless for my taste (great whammy bar wiggling, though). There is also a duet with Guy Lohnes, whom i've never heard of, and it's actually one of the more solid compositions here -- rumbling, wind tunnel guitar from one man and faint, repetitive tinkling from the other that grows into a spiral of shredded wailing. The last track is a collaboration with Jim O'Rourke, "Neuro Politics," in which one guitar wavers and makes spacy noises (probably Null's, although it's hard to say for sure) while the other does strange things in its own right... but on its own timetable, mon. O'Rourke is in no hurry... he knows he has all the time in the world and he likes to let shit BUILD, dammit. Not surprisingly, given his involvement, this is the most "open" of all the pieces on this disc (meaning that the execution is deliberately minimal and there's lots of open space), with lots of odd sounds mixed down pretty low so you have to pay attention. Often reminiscent of their collaboration on A NEW KIND OF WATER, which makes sense, since this is essentially a continuation of that album's "Neuro Geometry."

Yes, this is a good one... certainly not a bone-crunching noisefest by any means, nor was it intended to be (we have new Zeni Geva for that, remember?), but another welcome exploration of how guitars can make some really funny noises. Of particular interest for big fans of A NEW KIND OF WATER, even though the last track is the only one that really resembles that album, or perhaps those heavily into Lull (apparently Null actually LISTENED to the flip sides of those Null/Lull splits).

Null -- TERMINAL BEACH [Manifold Records]

The Time Immolator burped and heaved them out onto the white beach, then winked out of sight once again. TASCAM-Girl, long used to sudden shifts of movement (the result of wearing high-heel jackboots most of her life), managed to land on the sand upright; the Captain, however, suffered the indignity of eating sand. He came up spluttering, spitting a mouthful of wet white grains. Wiping the dirt away, he looked around and said: "Okay, where the fuck are we now?"

"Terminal beach," TASCAM-Girl replied, staring out into the endless ocean. A lone gull watched them from a buoy three hundred yards into the black water. "Which happens to be the title of a story by J. G. Ballard, and of the latest sonic rumbling from Ultrasonik Uberguitarist Null."

"He's dropped the initials?"

"Sure. Why not? Nobody uses them anyway. And it's not like anybody in THIS country can remember how to spell Kazuyuki."

"So what's the album like?"

"Just listen. Can't you hear it?"

He turned his attention to the ocean, and he DID hear it -- a slow- motion wailing, accompanied by periodic thuds and grunts. "I hear it," he said, "but what is it?"

"The song's called 'Zero Wave.' On the album it's followed by 'Voice of Eternity,' where immolated guitars burned by radiation sickness duel with shimmering ghost overtones in most ambient fashion. Actually, with the exception of 'War Dance,' this is essentially the most ambient thing Null's done in quite a while. It's also one of his strongest outings. Have I mentioned that the disc comes in a really cool package? The booklet is white with silver printing -- mostly pictures of decaying skeletons, Null is very fixated on the death thing -- and comes in a red jewelbox. Most distinctive."

The Captain surveyed the beach and found it was littered with bones. Far in the distance he thought he saw a full skeleton half-buried in the sand. "So what's the skinny on the one non-ambient thing?"

"Well, actually there are two, but 'Cosmic Rape' is so short that it doesn't really count, and it's just a lead-in to 'War Dance' anyway, in which he beats this one chunky riff to death for about seventeen minutes with hummingbird guitars flutter at the edges and ghost guitars wail in the background. Call it the 'Son of Slamking' if you like; it's either totally brilliant or endlessly irritating, depending on your politics, I guess. I'm pretty sure you can guess where I stand on the issue."

"Given your obscene fantasies about the man, I have do doubt at all. So is there more?"

"Oh yes. The album's last track is 'Terminal Beach," which combines his usual back of freaky guitar tricks with a sound much like a cathedral pipe organ. It's most hep. As I say, this disc is definitely a keeper. One of his better moments for sure."

"Swell." He turned in circles, looking for something, anything, that might indicate a way back to civilization. "So, with that settled, what do we do now?"

"Well, if you happen to have your flamethrower handy, I brought a bag of marshmallows...."

Null -- EXTASY OF ZERO-G SEX [Vinyl Communication]

I... i'm not sure about this one. About three-fourths of it is brilliant, a series of churning cyclotron noisescapes worthy of his prime releases -- and about a quarter of it is, uh, full of annoying (deliberately?) sounds that render the songs in question almost unlistenable. So this... is a tricky one. To mildly complicate matters, the song titles appear to actually be star names, not exactly an easy way to differentiate between them. But then, when has Null ever made things easy for anybody? After all, that's part of the attraction, isn't it? Sure....

Good tracks include "O-01," the opening barrage of whirling cyclo-noise (slo-mo style); "M-01," with a kinetic riff (and space noises behind it) that make me think it might be an outtake from TERMINAL BEACH; "W-01," a shuddering, toxic near-loop of distorted sonic waste like an overheated space engine; "X-02," full of ping-pong guitars (and most likely left over from the ULTIMATE MATERIAL II sessions -- at least, that's what it sounds like); "J-01," another noise-driven pulse signal; and "W-02," an even dreamier and more stoned version of the earlier W track. Tracks that border on the irritating thanks to dinky noises repeated forever: um, pretty much all of the rest. You may want to listen to this one first before you buy, all right, mon?

Okay, here's the deal. While i'm not completely sure yet that i'm fully down with this sudden shift into electronic noise (i still remain convinced that this works much better live than on disc; see the Null live review elsewhere for more on that), at least Null is trying to be a moving target. He's at least moving in a new direction, which is more than i can say for a lot of the Japanese avant/noise artists. One of the irritating things about the entire Japanese scene is that while they're all fantastic musicians, a lot of them appear to settle into one gig and milk it to death (really, Merzbow and Aube have been doing the same thing for song that they're practically acting on autopilot now, and i'm not terribly convinced this is a good thing). At least Null keeps