Review Summary: a car-crash of laugh-tracks
When reaching for a red-bricked slab of harsh noise, what I’m usually hoping for is
escape. For all its loudness and starkness and death, I crave comfort in its static, grasping for relief, for a release, like staring into the sun, witnessing tide chewing shore, wind whipping hills, rain pounding canopy. These metallic sine waves are not natural, yet they mimic the hallmarks thereof; radiating a stubborn refusal to be structured, organised, discerned; of existing for the sake of
it, not
us; of capturing bottling bearing the big unkempt endlessness of everything. It’s oddly reassuring, the fast track ego death that the genre can offer, to feel small and insignificant, for it to fucking go away already, the job and the bills and the rest of it, and find silence beauty bliss in loud ugly spaces.
In that sense, Kazumoto Endo does not cater to my preferences. On both his 1999 classic
While You Were Out and 2024 thumper
At the Controls, you can feel that human presence, the pulling of strings, Endo influencing the needle, oiling the apparatus. This isn't an escape; you couldn't, even if you wanted to. You’re strapped to chair, light blaring overhead, eyes stapled open, with the printer screeching bongos blaring contact mic howling landmines dropped down the shitting stairs again and again and again and a -- nd Endo’s staring right at you, the whole time, forceps in hand, grinning expectantly, or perhaps hopefully?
He wants you to enjoy it. I mean, he’s certainly enjoying himself. His playfulness is electric, contagious, as he pulls rug out from under rug from under rug from under the heat death of the universe (in d minor). Via truckloads of jank, textured-variously, expectations are subverted before they’re established, his gooey chainsaw tapestry never left to settle in any one place. There’s no consistent rumble, no reliable sway, the experience (instead) a series of sucker punches. Fear not!, for it’s all slapstick, merely for show, a car-crash of laugh-tracks, where the joke is always at your expense. Throughout its masquerade of pseudo-hell, there is no respite, no profound rebirth of the self through the fuzz, no attainment of a higher state of being, no deeper meaning to be gleaned … but it is really quite funny. Torture chamber gives way to bouncy castle, sadism to masochism, and pain to pleasure. I guess that’s one way to keep the lights on.
