Reflections about cool have been at the forefront of Disaster Amnesiac's thoughts as I've compulsively listened to Cuts, the 2013 Rare Noise Records release from Noise power trio Merzbow-Pándi-Gustafsson over the last few weeks. We all know the drill: if you find someone or something cool, we do things to try and keep the cool happening. Heaven forbid if someone that you find cool decides that you are not cool. It's happened to me and yeah it stings for a while but eventually the hurt wears off. After all, you're surely involved in other pursuits. If you aren't, well go and get a life bud and maybe stop being so concerned about what other people think. As regards cool music, chances are the only pain you'll suffer will likely be a bit more tinnitus, a situation much more easily managed, despite its constant annoyance. It would seem as though this may be one of the reasons that hardcore music fans can be such loner types. Why risk all of that squishy emotional involvement when you can just hit play for a CD such as this and find the cool that you're seeking, provided your music consumption includes Noise? Cuts is indeed a very noisy affair. The session was performed in Budapest over exactly one day, a day during which it sounds as though drummer Balázs Pándi had prepared for. Dude plays with ferocity all over his drums, on five of the tracks that appear to be named from some type of poetry chapbook. Pándi gives blast beats, Samba Metal passages, snare to tom to tom to tom runs, cymbal washes, and they're all delivered with the muscularity evinced by the top flight drummers in Metal and Fusion. Balázs gets down hard and heavy while laying down rhythm patterns and bursts of energy atop of which Masami Akita and Mats Gustafsson do their respective things. Said things are the noisy and dense walls of noise which Akita, as Merzbow and other monikers, has refined since 1979. Surely Akita gets paid to be a Noise artist and when one listens to records such as Cuts one realizes why this is the case. Total conviction and a commitment to over the top aesthetic choices inform his sound selections. Discerning consumers of his type of esoteric Noise summoning will all agree that his stuff's among the tightest examples from the genre. His sounds just churn away unceasingly during the disc's pretty lengthy duration. Mats spends the first few tracks pulling burbling and screeches from a small rig of what sound to Disaster Amnesiac to be ring modulators and some type of reverb unit. Between the two of them, Merzbow and Gustofsson develop huge slabs of Noise, sometimes somewhat "conversational" at others just not so much connected as just wailing within the same spectral areas. Fans of Mats' saxophone playing must wait until three tracks in for that to emerge, along with his clarinet a bit later. All of his multi-phonic prowess and high energy freedom search blowing is there, and, lifted by the drum propulsion of Pándi and the high energy electronic scree of Merzbow, it really moves in pleasingly Free ways. Taken in as the music of a unit, and despite the probably hurried nature of the recording, Cuts highlights a trio that plays with apparent simpatico. When I've stood a bit further away from the speakers, I hear these sounds as group sounds, particularly the case when the drums are fully present in the mix. That mix is good, too. All of the varied sound generators and drums and cymbals and woodwinds placed within an equal balance. There is even some clear slap back type of wave form happening from the drums on deep lines. cuts. Listen for it! Cuts is a solid holler of free form energetic blasting from some deep players of the international Noise/Free Jazz/Free Improvisation/Free Fusion scene. It's a damn blast and as cool as the Cramps t-shirt donned by Mats Gustafsson at its recording session, along with being hot as hell in its free form caterwaul. You can be cool if you find it, and you can be cool if don't either. It's out there though, just sayin'.
No comments:
Post a Comment