What a pairing! As collaborations go, this one is truly inspired, and one which some may consider long overdue. It’s pitched as ‘UK industrial breakbeat meets Japanese noise on [a] unique collaboration’.
Inevitably, it’s a unique collaboration, bringing together as it does two unique acts, both pioneering in their fields. But if MBM, formed in 1987, emerged from what one might consider the second wave of industrial – that post-Throbbing Gristle, percussion-focused style which brough a more formal shaping of the genre, Merzbow, who started out in eight years earlier, very much belongs to that first wave which pushed sound far, far beyond the confines of music as it had previously been known. Both are broadly considered ‘industrial’, but MBM’s Jack Dangers is right when he observes not their commonality, but their difference, when he says of the collaboration, “We may not speak the same language, but in the vortex of sound there is a raw, primal understanding that transcends words. Noise can be art - a visual representation could perhaps be Jackson Pollock’s ‘No. 5, 1948’ - a plexus of chaos redefining what music can and could be. Pushing boundaries with Masami wasn’t just a musical adventure, it was a masterclass in sonic anarchy.”
My point is that this difference of language is not only verbal, but musical, also.
The blurbage outlines how this collaboration ‘sees the duo take listeners on a transcendental journey, focusing on the dismantling of beat and structure and recycling the result through layers of beautifully crafted noise and feedback loops, giving birth to new rhythms buried deep in the dirt.’
But, as a friend of mine commented ruefully on hearing the preview online, it feels like a rather one-sided affair with too much Meat Beat Manifesto and not enough Merzbow. To break that down, it is beaty, and it is noisy, and the album’s two longform tracks are powerful and intense. But what about the balance? It feels as if the balance is evolutionary: it gets harsher, noisier, and more fucked-up as it progresses.
The first track, ‘¡FLAKKA!’ offer up a brutal twenty-minute sonic assault. The idea is that it ‘takes constantly evolving breakbeats which are gradually broken down over time, driven through a filter of harsh noise, destroying the old to give birth to the new. Raw and unforgiving, the track is a behemoth that blends mutant forms of broken beats and hints of dub, creating rhythmic noise of the highest calibre in the process.’ But the noise often feels like it takes a back seat to the crashing, overloading, distorting percussion. Theen again, there are some passages which are just pure melting distortion, where the beats are broken and smashed down to a pulp, creating a swirling vortex of howling feedback and skull-crushing noise. Rhythm dissolves into distortion, into a swell of overloading pulsations Six minutes in, you feel your head begins to ache and your body begin to sag, pummelled from all directions by this overloading noise which blasts and burrs, grinds and scrapes like using an angle grinder without earplugs. The tweets and flutters are more like residual tinnitus than tune. It’s a sonic inferno that singes the senses and leaves you feeling hollowed out, a husk decimated by a stampede that is the crushing wall of noise that grows and grows at the track progresses. Twelve minutes in and it’s a wall of distortion, like the last moments of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Happiness in Slavery’ played on a loop for ten minutes through knacked-up speakers with torn cones, flapping like damp socks in a high wind. Fifteen minutes in, it hits peak overload, but also peak percussive riot. It works, but... but what? It’s brutal, and peak noise, and perhaps we should accept it for what it is. It’s harsh, and it’s a headache: so we really need it to be more?
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As the accompanying notes explain that second track ‘Burner’ takes the record to its ultimate conclusion, the initial drum beat broken down so that it is barely recognisable. Pulsating distortion and high end audio fragments bleed into each other as the track lumbers forth and destroys everything in its path before slowly unravelling, degrading and falling apart.’
It’s sixteen minutes of pure overloading distortion, and it’s here that we really see Merzbow step to the fore and proffer forth the most brutal mangling of sound imaginable.
There’s certainly some role reversal here: conventionally, the student or successor usurps the progenitor, crushes and devours the influencer and emerges basking in the glory of the new. This is – in a reduced way, which really doesn’t do justice to anything or anyone – the theory putt forward by Harold Bloom in ‘The Anxiety of Influence’. But here, it’s the influencer, the previous generation, which annihilates its successor, quite literally with this obliterative wall of noise. And it’s good. The world may be full of noise, but this is the ultimate noise and the best option for drowning out the noise of the world.
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