“Merzbow’s back (you knew he would be) … ” So read the first few words of the blurb for another Merzbow disc, Merzbuta, but the same sentiment could apply to just about any Merzdisc. Just when you think the guy’s exhausted every possible permutation of his approach to sound (or music, or noise, or whatever term doesn’t shock you), he dives back in as if he were a fresh young thing still pasting together his photocopied album covers in his parent’s attic.
He’s also never been one to shrink away from the kind of conceptual productions that would make most other people wince, or at least shield their wallets protectively. The concept for the 50-disc-and-then-some Merzbox was madness enough, but he and the folks at Extreme in Australia banged heads to make it happen. The result was the single most ambitious documentation of any one artist’s output in a single commercial unit; it’s right up there with the Ya Ho Wha 13: God and Hair set, the Miles Davis archive box sets being produced by Sony, the 13-CD Kan Mikami set PSF put out, and maybe even also the Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs LP box set of the entire Beatles catalog.
Mr. Akita’s gone and done it again with his new 13-album (!) series, inspired — however loosely — by Olivier Messaien’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux. Rather than release the whole thing only in a single set, he’s elected to make the series available as one release a month starting back in January of ’09 and stretching to February of next year. That said, each volume’s only appearing in a pressing of 1,000 copies, and even if the discs sport some classy art by Jenny Akita I gotta say I’m growing increasingly skeptical of such artificial scarcity in an age of high-quality digital downloads. Grab the CD now, wait for the box set later, or just give up and hold out for the iTunes offering; pick your poison.
That said, don’t let my cynicism about the packaging and marketing put you off from the Bird coop. The first disc alone is a total monster, taking all the jazz lessons from Door Open at 8 AM (and some of the “Merz Rock” tracks in the early ‘Box discs) and catapulting them forward. On top of the usual Merzsplattertronics — the poor guy’s going to wear out the knobs on his EMS at this rate — there’s a barrel-roll bombardment of rollercoaster drums, every bit as assaultive as the electronics and the tape screeches that make up the rest of the trademark Merz sound. It’s like the Elvin Jones drum solos from Coltrane’s “Ascension” caught in the car wreck that adorns the cover of Merzbow’s Crash for Hi-Fi.
Of the two short tracks, “Fandangos in Space” and “Tori no Uta”, only the first one follows the more conventional (if that’s the word) Merzbow format: it’s oscillator-driven scree, shear and splatter all the way through. “Tori” brings the drums back, and the closer piles everything on top of everything else to take us out the way we came in. Now let’s see him do it for twelve more albums without running out of steam.
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