Album: Dead Lotus
Artist: Merzbow
Label: No Funeral Records
Catalogue no: nf-009
Tracklist:
1. Dead
Lotus pt 1
2. Dead
Lotus pt 2
3. Dead
Lotus pt 3
4. Spirulina
Blue
I have pondered, many
times in fact, how long it would take for someone to listen to the entirety of
Merzbow’s recorded output – his productivity would surely make that a
lifetime’s work. You’d get to the end of the last one you bought only to find
that in the meantime he’s released 600 further albums.
Before I go any further,
I am not denigrating either the man or the music – I find his work endlessly
fascinating and texturally multi-layered. I have more than a few of his
releases and each one has something new to offer, and something new to say. On
top of that, even at his fiercest and rawest, his collages of blasting jet
engine noise and swirling chaos more often than not send me into blissful
states of reverie.
This strictly limited
edition cassette release for the tiny No Funeral Records label out of
Cambridge, Canada is no exception – three shortish slabs of lush carpets of
chaotic static and pure noise, interspersed with recognisable almost rhythmic
bass ‘beats’ and shrieking high-pitched whines, feedback, squeaks, and machine
noises on side one (which form a themed whole) and a longer, layered, and
shimmering assemblage that is, dare I say it, almost tuneful. ‘Spirulina Blue’ is what I would call ‘classic’
industrial music, the kind I particularly gravitated to in the late
eighties/early nineties. This one still has the Merzbow trademark nuclear granulation
but also includes a keening ‘melody’ weaving its way through the noise. I’m
even tempted to categorise this as dark noise ambient – labels are mostly
useless when it comes to this Japanese artist but in this case it fits nicely.
This, as I said above, is
a strictly limited release on cassette so if my description tickles your
earbuds then you can purchase from either:
or
Psymon Marshall 2019
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