VARIOUS ARTISTS

Merzbow “Frog” remixed and revisited

2CD / Misanthropic Agenda

Another compilation with artists attempting to remix Merzbow, another failure bound to happen? It has happened before and it will happen again, but not this time around. Usually, Merzbow is the Eiger Northface to most artists, corpses and bodies shattered all around its feet. The sheer mass, power and scale of Merzbow, the uncompromising, all encompassing and almost violently direct approach of this purest form of noise, will not ever be reached by any other artist. Though some noise musicians, especially from Japan – thinking of Aube, Masonna or Gerogerigegege – have tried and produced some work equally as impressive, but looking simply at the time and output Masami Akita has spent and produced in his field of art, there is no other alike him. I remember an older compilation with Merzbow-remixes, who don’t offer anything anymore for me nowadays, except a memory of trying to blast my neighbour out of his flat because he annoyed me with stupid 4/4-techno. Back then this compilation (I don’t remember its name but it was released on Blast First and had a pink cover slip, it should be around here somewhere) was great. It offered straightforward, brutal shades of noise of all kinds of frequency spectres. But the artists on it, as I see it now, tried to hard to be something they ain’t. Believe it or not, as soon as musicians leave the field of harmonies and try to find new paths and beauty in what is usually perceived as noise, personality is what leads the way. You can’t play an image or a role when building an echoy dome of scraping noise like a train derailing in a monstrous dark cave. Maybe it is just that full force thunderstorms of raging white noise hitting all spots of my eardrum at full volume at once isn’t as thrilling anymore as it used to be back in 1995.

The main difference to back then is that all the artists on “Merzbow: Frog – remixed and revisited” have their own signature and character that you can hear and depict in the tracks. The list is long and inspiring. Among others John Wiese (Bastard Noise), Pita (Mego), Fennesz, Russell Haswell, Hecker, Hrvatski and a slew of others have tried their hands at the knobs and most succeeded. As a most surprising guest, SUNNO))), the darkest, slowest epic-doom-metal-noise-band (well, it is still metal, in way) joins in. And also Merzbow himself offers another variation on his original source-piece for this compilation. There are some more artists with great but a little less known names, but I’ll leave them to you to discover yourself. All do a great job and it will take you a while to digest all of this. To even gulp it down is a lot to ask of any strong person. Of course, longwinding dark and bass-loaden noise-drones like “gekihatsu” by Never Presence Forever are easier to stand than the wild and dynamic earpounding of Pita, but then again, you wouldn’t play this on your mothers birthday anyway. Quite the contrary to yourself maybe. From time to time, I need a quite good dose of pure noise, which usually made me take Merzbow’s “Aqua Necromancer” or “Pulse Demon” out of the cupboard. When I am in the office or even at home, at times I like to listen to the noise of the traffic in front of the window as well. I guess there is still a big love for noise in me and a hearing habit that has been for ever jaded by a youth spent searching for the most extreme sounds available on a medium. Some time after I hit on Merzbow I stopped searching for extremes and changed to other qualities in music, but the experience and the mindset is still there.

And a big row of CDs and vinyl records with nothing but noise on it is here still as well. But this is a great choice as well due to variation it offers. A promotion sized package of noise, in marketing terms. On the other hand, SUNNO)))’s track alone would be worth the whole price, especially when being listened to on headphones some time after midnight when you are already tired and weary. Makes the world look quite different. The variety of sounds on this two CDs is really vast. Gerritt’s “frog inside hypercube” even features some beautiful soothing sounds, that is, if you find the sound of faraway Aeolian harves soothing even if they are hidden behind an array of building machines and aeonic creaks. A slow reminder of what the world was like before there was music, or humankind or even time itself. Or what the world is actually today. If you, for instance compare the aural experiments with field recordings by Justin Bennett or the inner worldly explorations of Cordell Klier with the crap called music the world is being filled today – I am talking about the plastilin radio shit that drowns us day in day out even in public places – then you’ll get to the same conclusion as me: that the sounds called noise and the art produced with it by people such as Merzbow or the ones on this compilation is truly spiritual and naturalistic music and art, respectively. One that questions the synthetic differentiation between man and nature on the one side and machine and the products of man on the other hand. An encompassing viewpoint of nature as it is would argue that toxic waste, overpopulation and ultimately the self-destruction of mankind is just another natural act in a long row of natural acts. It has happened before.