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South Saturn Delta, "Experience the Concreteness"
This japanoise supergroup was formed in 2003, pooling the talents of Hiroshi Hasegawa (Astro & C.C.C.C.) on voice and synth, Maso Yamazaki of Masonna on guitar and voice, and Nobuko Emi on drums. This is their debut album and features four live recordings taped in various venues in Osaka and Tokyo between 2003 and 2006.
I am not a fan of live albums as a rule, as they are invariably crude documents completely divorced from all the elements that make gigs and events successful and rarely do they do the artists any justice; moreover they always leave me a tad disappointed. Noise albums, however, present something of a dichotomy, as by definition they are collisions of unstructured chaos and the element of the accidental plays an enormous part. So one could quite legitimately posit the idea that the vagaries and limitations of the recording process in a live situation become part of the performance as well, adding a further layer to the end result.
SSD assail from the get go. The usual tropes of the genre are there: unrelenting guitar distortion and feedback; electronic screechings, blips, growls and drones; along with shouts and screams batter the listener in an ear-bleeding aural assault. It is a one-sided sonic battle intended no doubt to crush the senses into submission, drilling into the skull and vacuum-cleaning the brains out through the resultant aperture, machine-like in its inhuman intensity and industrial brutality; no amount of pleading and begging will stay their course. The machines will go on until every last one of us is extinct and quite likely they will then turn on themselves and each other because there will be nothing else left for them. It is complete mayhem just for the joy of indulging in wanton mayhem and it seems that just like the ethos of fellow noise artists C.C.C.C. there is no attempt here at intellectualism, just an aggressive form of play, slaughtering with a smile on the face. Even so, there is a distinctly different approach to the aforementioned outfit, instead of a slow unfolding evolution (as displayed on C.C.C.C.'s latest, Chaos is the Cosmos) there is a fast-breeder reactor style of progression: everything being a chain-reaction from one moment to the next; one idea suggesting something else which turn suggests yet another idea in a mushroom cloud of unbridled creativity.
My only complaint is that while I can sense a small glimpse of the sheer exuberance and rawness of an SSD live performance from these recordings, the essential element of being there and experiencing it first-hand is missing, thereby slightly emasculating the power. There's no denying though that it didn't detract a great deal from any appreciation of what was on offer here and that the 'live' recording aspect DID add another crunchy dimension to it. As an introduction to the work of this band it more than suffices and it is obvious from these performances that each musician works well with and plays off each other brilliantly to produce a homogenized and whole aesthetic. However, I would still like to hear a 'studio'-based album to get a fuller flavor of the wall of noise assault that SSD promises on this debut album.This is not saying that this is a bad record, far from it, every second of it is enjoyable and only whets my appetite to go and see them should they ever make it to the shores of of the UK.
I hope that another album is in the works or at least being thought about, but there is no doubt that we will be hearing a lot more from them in the future and for my part that would be very welcome.
