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Merzbow, "Eucalpyse"
Masami Akita is deeply troubled by the rampant, unchecked growth of the Tasmanian Blue Gum tree in India. It seems there is a eucalyptus apocalypse brewing. Nay, a Eucalypse, and he has written an album about it, insomuch as a Merzbow album can plausibly be topical, anyway.
Aside from the drolly-amusing portmanteau title, this release is noteworthy mainly for its elaborate and unusual packaging- a handcrafted wooden box. Admittedly, the box is pretty cool, although I had an embarrassingly tough time removing the CD and the liner notes from its clutches. However, I find it somewhat unnerving that the box conspicuously states that it was made in India, yet there is no mention of the type of wood used. It would be thematically appropriate to be made from the accursed Blue Gum tree, but it seems like it would have been mentioned somewhere if it had. Was some hapless, benign tree used for the packaging instead? This uncertainty fills me with low-level anxiety.
Much like an exotic plant that is introduced to a place where it has no natural enemies, Merzbow releases have proliferated out of control. While I greatly admire Akita's near-total abandonment of melody, conventional rhythm, and recognizable instrumentation, I only genuinely get excited about albums where he departs somewhat from "the Merzbow sound", such as Music For a Bondage Performance, Doors Open At 8 AM, or his collaborative projects. Eucalypse is not one of those albums yet it is a worthy and representative example of what Akita does.
Naturally, every track on the album is a roaring squall of white noise, feedback, cavernous clangings, and chirps. Occasionally, a murky guitar or organ sound will burble into the mix, then abruptly vanish or get buried beneath relentless static. None of the tracks really have any sort of cohesive development, but there is often a hypnotic ebb and flow and the texture is always shifting and incorporating or discarding components.
There is nothing mindblowing here for those already familiar with Merzbow's work, but the opening track stands apart from the others: the rhythmic foundation sounds like a giant subterranean piston and its insistent throbbing anchors the escalating storm of dissonance and laser noises quite nicely. Also, the fifth track has an exceptionally sinister sounding opening in which feedback coheres into actual identifiable notes before being enveloped in a slow-building roar. That said, Eucalypse may still only appeal to packaging fetishists and Merzbow completists.
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