Chattanooga Pulse

Merzbow
13 Japanese Birds Volume 8: Kokuchou
(Important)

As the story goes, according to filmmaker Stan Brakhage, an inebriated Jackson Pollock once demonstrated that his painting style was not a result of “chance operations” by flicking paint across the room and hitting his target—a doorknob—that was 35 feet away.  A Pollock painting isn’t simply a random mess; similarly, the music of Tokyo artist Masami Akita, the man behind Merzbow, isn’t just random noise.

Merzbow is an unequaled act and revered by many both in and out of the noise world, including Sonic Youth and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, and over Akita’s prolific career, he’s been able to explore noise from just about every angle.  A case in point is his insane 50-CD compilation Merzbox, the most impressive noise release ever and also one of the most audacious releases in musical history, which demonstrates abundantly the wide range of moods that can be evoked using noise.  Merzbow’s current effort is similarly ambitious; between January of this year and next January, Merzbow is releasing 13 monthly installments of his project 13 Japanese Birds.  It’s inspired by composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, a set of 13 piano pieces, each of which uses a different bird’s song.

The latest release, Volume 8: Kokuchou, begins with the powerful track “Mesmerism,” which centers on a distorted loop, enhanced with feedback and piercing noise shrieks with wavering frequencies.  It’s followed by the 24-minute “Black Swan,” on which Akita plays the drums (as he does on this entire series) relentlessly and freely, aligning somewhat with a grindcore style but with a more disorderly approach; at the 9-minute mark, the drums let up slightly, bringing the listener’s attention to the shattering electronic screams.  “Colored Rain” wanders with damaged, synthetic nature sounds that are somewhere between drizzle and a crackling forest fire, and the plodding “Ushiwaka 2” features relatively conventional drumbeats threatening to go out of phase with a looped beat.  It’s a harsh, chaotic and demanding album; it’s also a compelling album, and that’s no accident.

Various Artists
Esopus #12: Black and White
(Esopus)

It makes sense that the Seattle quartet the Intelligence has a home on the garage rock label In the Red, but the band seems to be driven by an urge to smash genres, not content to do basic retreads of gritty, nostalgic rock.  Every track on the group’s latest album, Fake Surfers, seems to go in a different direction; however, each falls in with a sound identity marked with a carefully crafted low-fidelity anti-sheen.  There’s a bit of pop/rock from the British Invasion workbook and some proto-punk thrashing about, but there are always a few odd elements lurking in each song, like a no-wave dissonance or scrappy weirdness, along the lines of early Residents or Chrome material.

“Debt & ESP” begins like it might be replicating some sick electronics from Throbbing Gristle, but it’s just a fake-out—the real song starts up with a great, dumb rhythmic tug, like a bratty teenage son of “My Sharona.”  “Saint Bartolomeu” shimmies into the room, and you can practically envision the teenagers twisting away to it, until the strangeness creeps in and engulfs the song with unexplained sounds.  Synthetic beats and tones get dirtied up on “I Hear Depression,” which sounds like some lost post-punk era b-side, and “Warm Transfers” is a peculiar, cavernous ditty, with reverb-drenched drum beats, a swinging acoustic guitar, and unabashedly cheery whistling.  There’s even a foray into rockabilly, “Universal Babysitter,” with a loopy slide guitar, and the album closes with its shortest track, “The Unessential Cosmic Perspective,” which could be a bizarro-world take of the Fall, but without the Mark E. Smith ranting.

With 12 songs clocking in at a little over half an hour, no track is long enough to wear out its welcome, and the Intelligence happily delivers the goods without an insider smugness or being insufferably blasé.  They clearly enjoy straying away from the middle of the road and staying on their toes; they avoid sounding boring by simply not being bored.

The Intelligence will play JJ’s Bohemia on September 21.