Review Summary: A landmark album for both artists, in the only language they share
Akita Masami may be at his actual, most consistent best as a collaborator. The face of the global noise movement may boast of a catalog rife with classic slabs of experimentation, but what he brings to the work of other artists is often a controlled chaos, a bracing hurricane-force blast into an artist’s formula. From the rightly acclaimed extremity of the Boris and Full of Hell collabs, to the more nuanced (and underrated) Genesis P-Orridge and Richard Pinhas works, Merzbow has, more often than not, a sense of wholehearted synthesis between his own vision, and that of his collaborators. One of his great artistic strengths has always been a lack of ego; his approach to his artistic partnerships has always been one of symbiosis, rarely confrontation and never obliteration, a pitfall that, in the hands of a less deft sound sculptor, might be too easy to fall into.
Embracing the tumult that inheres in a collision of Industrial and Japanese noise, this collaboration swerves squarely into the realm of the deconstructive. What Ben Frost tried to do with metal earlier this year, Masami and Meat Beat Manifesto autocrat Jack Danger have handily accomplished with electronic breaks, welding, bending and breaking the stolid electro-industrial framework of Meat Beat Manifesto into a sensorily invasive, violently beautiful mechanical mess. Underneath the repetitiveness, the skeletal metallic clangor, there’s a vital sense of interplay between these artists, a constant push and pull between musical forces that pollutes each, and pushes it into the realm of the constantly electrifying. Where the Full of Hell album felt much more like Full of Hell
featuring Merzbow, this is an album where the unique sensibilities of each artist are given a sense of fluidity, of space to see-saw back and forth between those two poles of industrial breaks and harsh noise. It’s the most focused and exciting both of these artists have sounded in ages and it is an endless odyssey into a pulsating pit of frayed neurons and bursting synapses.
Across two sprawling tracks, the harshness of their mutual sound is given ample room to breathe, to compliment the other, become a sensory plunge into a toxic mercury bath, structured enough to fill its space, fluid enough to drown in. It's a journey into the depths of anti-music, yet within this chaos lies a spontaneous construction, a playfulness where noise and rhythm feel like they’re dancing back and forth around a ballroom in hell. Like navigating through shards of shattered glass, or emerging from a club into the deafening roar of a post-storm gale, each track is an onslaught. In this testament to the power of collaboration, where Merzbow and Scanner traverse divergent paths, pushing the boundaries of sonic exploration with a relentless and joyful fervor. My only knock against
Extinct? That the album art so totally belies the life, originality and vitality of the music within.
