Review Summary: Merz is as Merz does, and that's fine by me
A wonderful thing about noise is how subjective its qualities can be. I can listen to Merzbow’s latest and say almost anything as to why I like it, and people can smile along and nod or roll their eyes as the case may be and I am unable to find fault with them for whatever impression they’re given. It’s pure autism in a sense, and I don’t mean for that to be insensitive, for that sense is that noise is sound that thrives in and reifies a sense of alienation, of something that can’t be experienced communally or in tandem with nearly anyone, the live noise scene notwithstanding. Pedestrian Deposit and other vital live noise acts tend to thrive on the spectacle of their experience, a spectacle which instills a shared sensibility that noise itself does not. In that sense, the (to me, idiotic) trend of putting a black bag over one’s head at a noise show has a certain sense behind it, one’s experience is reduced to a pure isolation of enclosure, with washes of sound making up the near-totality of experience.
I liked this, especially the first track, Hatonal 2, which makes up more than half of the album. It’s pulsing, swirling, vertiginous in a way that’s rarely reducible to sensory assault or electronic fiddling. The sound throbs with color pouring into oil shuddering trapped in a paint mixer, rupturing in stochastic sprays of sound and skin-tingling texture. The second is a little more superfluous, a little more bleepy, a lot more meandering into a whole lot of not much of anything, like Akita went and dissected a thunder squall and left all its little parts laying on an antiseptic table somewhere. But this is why I dive into Merzbow albums I guess, because no matter what you get, even when it tends towards the tedious, as it occasionally does on the second half, it’s never going to be the same thing twice. Merzbow never asked for a consensus, he’s just an artist driven to continuously create, and love what he does or hate it, that’s an ethos that’s worth respecting.
