John Bemis
Reporter
@bemiscourant
There has never been a discography more thoroughly debated in it’s legitimacy as music than that of Japan’s Masami Akita, better known by his stage name, Merzbow. Since the late 1970’s, Merzbow has consistently defined the genre of noise, challenging the already widened boundaries of experimental music through use of harsh, abrasive textures and bleeding industrial sounds. His prolific sonic terrorism has left him subject to much praise and recognition, as-well as debate, as listeners and critics alike fail to see his work as actual music. Whatever the true medium, Akita refuses to deviate from extremes, collaborating with artists such as Boris and Sunn O))), adding a new level of relentless ear-piercing distortion to all that he touches. In his most recent-effort, he lends his ear for tortured sound to Maryland extreme metal quartet FULL OF HELL, working cooperatively to create the most intense and ingenious metal LP of 2014.
FULL OF HELL as a stand-alone band are sounding tighter than ever. Any sense of garage-punk amateurity is substituted with a strong reassurance of rehearsal, with every riff perfectly syncopated and drums that never miss a hit. The first track, Burst Synapse, jumps right out of the gate with pummeling jackhammer riffs and thick blast beats, choking off at a minute in length, delivering satisfyingly quick and disorienting punch. Similarly brief, blood-soaked pieces of grindcore follow with tracks Gordian Knot and Humming Miter, giving the album’s first third significant familiarity, without lacking in awe-striking force. Working to sound more instrumentally together as a unit has only allowed their pursuit of chaos to seem more masterfully calculated, rather than rigid.
Merzbow’s role as a producer and mediator of ideas much outshines any desire to take over as songwriting partner. Rather than throwing periodic shots of harsh noise into FULL OF HELL’s already fast-paced compositional style, he works to add a much needed layer of satisfying grime. Tracks High Fells and Fawn Heads and Unjoy show Akita casting a low-frequency beam of grinding noise into the hellish mix, allowing the slow breakdowns to really boom and envelop, and the frenetic blast-beat sections to become more unhinged and jagged. Merzbow’s subtle hand works to mold these tracks to become even more jarring in their effect, guiding an otherwise run-of-the-mill extreme metal project to their full potential as a true force of nature.
There are, though, moments where Masami steps out from behind the curtain, creating nightmarish constructs out of clawing cacophony. Raise Thee, Great Wall, Bloodied and Terrible, climbs out of a swamp of guitar feedback into an atmosphere of sputtering digital glitches and agonizing shrieks, further distorting as it escalates in volume before shifting directly into the ravaged groove-metal of Thrum in the Deep. The second-to-last and longest track on the LP, Ludjet Av Gud, carries ominous winds around echoing, overblown drums, showing a slightly more minimalist use of texture to a much more perverse, creeping result.
Being the antithesis of music, Merzbow’s emotional inspirations rarely shine through. Long considered to be no-wave, purposefully passionless anti-art, it is clear on Full of Hell & Merzbow that, despite an impenetrable exterior, noise music has the capacity to draw upon unbridled, carnivorous fury. Akita is not so much taking throttle of, but rather fleshing out the improved ideas that FULL OF HELL are bringing to the table, preventing the overt, indiscriminate anarchism from becoming a heavy-metal cliche. In this collaboration, both parties act in order to focus one-another, never allowing each-other to relent from targeted, emancipating wrath.
https://soundcloud.com/profoundlorerecords/full-of-hell-gordian-knot
