Originally written by Drowned in Sound · 11 September 2001
Japanese noise deity Merzbow has hooked up with the charmingly named low-end rockers Porn (who were previously charmingly known as the Men of Porn...) to create twelve tracks of what is basically a cross between a broken radio detuned to Stockhausen FM and that horrible sound they use to scare hedgehogs, with not much variation in between.
'Don’t call it music if it offends you' is the tag line for LPs like this. Since musicians ran out of fresh chord combinations a couple of hundred years ago, to be truly original these days it seems the very fabric of sound has to be torn apart, spat on, incinerated, and put back together like a second hand jigsaw from Oxfam, covered in unfamiliar stains and with most of the important bits missing.
Although currents of music do occasionally swirl through this sea of noise, the odd drum beat or swampy, juddering guitar riff, they're largely obscured by the tumbling waterfalls of broken glass, balls of maggots and boiling cauldrons of blood, gristle and fingerless fingernails doing battle inside your sound system. If you ever want to kill someone, but don't fancy the whole ball n' chain scene, just lock them in a room with a carving knife and this album playing at full blast. It’ll look just like suicide, but we'll know who's really to blame. Merzbow, that's who.
Known to his friends, if he has any, as Masami Akita, Merzbow isn't just your average avant-garde post-modernist noise producing record label owning Joe. According to that highly reliable journalist's tool Wikipedia he has also been the editor of several Japanese magazines, has written a few books and enjoys contributing articles about fetish culture and S&M. Wow.
The classic criticism of his genre is that it contributes to the dehumanisation of music, but this is a very human record: all blind confusion, muffled screams and unthinking violence. When listening to it, it’s worth bearing in mind that after seeing the twin towers collapse in on themselves in a maelstrom of ash and melted steel on September 11, 2001 Stockhausen publicly declared it to be the greatest artistic statement of the century.
The point is that there can be beauty in the most horrific things, be it the flaming death of thousands or the arterial gush of a slit throat, the detonation of an atom bomb or the animal caterwauling of a suckling infant having its tiny hands nailed to the floor. This is a real Auschwitz of an album. Not exactly the sort of thing you'd stick on to do the washing up to though.