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Merzbow, "Anicca"
Lucas Schleicher reviewed one of the other Merzbow releases this month, the collaboration with Richard Pinhas, Keio Line. Also having that album, I listened to it and agreed with Lucas’ summation: the balance of the two artists helped pull Akita out of his usual scraping noise and into something else entirely. Anicca, on the other hand, is not so different or unique. It’s sort of like a relative that you have fond childhood memories of, but once you visit them again, you realize they're sort of an asshole.
I, like many people of my ilk, first got into Merzbow when Relapse was hyping Venerology as THE most extreme recording EVER. It was the gateway drug for me into the noise scene, but even then, it lost some of its luster once I heard some of the other artists doing similar work. Because of that, my connection to Akita's work became casual at best: I'd pick up the odd album here or there, and I drooled over the Merzbox, but that was about it. So I wasn't privy to his dabbling with percussion, samples and laptop experiments.
Oddly enough, Anicca is a step back to his tabletops full of pedals and home-made metal instrument, which is pictured in the liner notes. So the overall sound through these three tracks is pretty much classic mid 1990s Merzbow, for better or worse. Clashing waves of noise and static, modulated feedback, overdriven blasts, etc. There does seem to be a greater attention to mixing and layering, which is pleasant to hear: it's not just about blowing out audio equipment when being played at low volumes.
One of the faults with this album is a whole is that it is front loaded with its most interesting track. The chirping bird sounds bathed in reverb cutting into a flanged noise squeal is nothing out of the ordinary, but for the entire track, Akita drums over the noise, always staying prominent in the mix. Obviously a free style jam, the rapid fire patterns lie somewhere between Lightning Bolt and Free Jazz era Ornette Coleman. Full of rapid fire snare rolls and aggravated assaults of tom drums, it's like every prog rock drum solo from the 1970s spliced into one track over the usual electronic din.
The remaining two tracks, unfortunately, forego the drums in favor of a pure noise attack. The second track allows more high frequency psychedelic swirls of noise, akin to Akita’s contemporaries C.C.C.C. over extended passages of feedback, quick cuts, and some sort of buried rhythmic elements, before ending more stripped down, with harsh Morse code tones and passages of pink noise. Track three has an overall hollow, reverbed sound to it, ending with heavy low end pulse that one could headbang to slowly if so inclined, and what sounds like some buried musical samples and noise rhythms resembling a grindcore tape played at quarter speed after being left in the sun for a few months.
The biggest problem with this is, it’s just regular Merzbow. After Keio Line's more innovative sounds and textures, this feels like a step backwards. While it has some good element for nostalgia, the older sounding tracks aren't motivating me to grab more Merz albums I might have missed, and after the more interesting introductory track, it feels kind of flat afterwards.
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