Caminate
The tracks alternate, though the package design is so obscure that the only way to tell which tracks appear in which order is to match the times of each to a title and time listed on one of four different cards inserted in the front pocket of the digipack. The first piece is terrific: Merzbow's "Esrma 1" is based on a pattern of alternating notes which twist subtly as layers of grainy synth-like sounds are added one at a time. It's a very linear and musical piece, with a straightforward upward spiral abruptly ending with what must be... a guitar through a flanger. (Uh-oh.) Here's where Tranz starts to falter. Even without the knowledge of specific guitar effects' sounds, an obvious sound is recognizable, and Elliott Sharp seems incapable of providing much more than off-the-shelf guitar and effect sounds for the remaining 3/4 of this album. Sharp's first turn at the wheel, "Mares 1," begins with a burbling, flatly-tense background bed of grainy noise, but gracelessly throws in such chestnuts as: the outer-space phaser sound!; The guitar-shop finger-tapping shred solo (these are cringe-inducing without David Lee Roth in the vicinity)!; The twisting the delay-knob up and down sound!; and so on,.... Sharp marches so blithely over the pleasingly crunchy backdrop that I tried to listen to his piece as if I was hearing two radio stations at once, absorbing one while information from another was irritatingly bleeding through. On track 3, Merzbow tries again, but he does not match the focus he started out with, and the final track is little more than a Max/MSP effect doing its thing uneventfully for a few minutes. If a person was involved in its composition, he appears to have removed himself before the disc went to press. The as aforementioned intriguing appeal is rather like rubbernecking: people were maimed in this car crash, but it's tough not to keep looking at them. I have returned to this album four times since I first heard it. It's maybe a good textbook about how two very disparate artists might force themselves to work together across styles and methods. It might even have worked, had the artists not both phoned in their music. If they'd arrived at a solid idea and explored it, maybe this could have been surprising music instead of merely an exercise. Still: ever heard a Merzbow album with finger-tapping on it?
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