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Categories are devilish things. They seem to exist solely for the purpose of being defied. This goes doubly so when it comes to music, where the albums I find most fascinating and personally resonant resist having a single, easy label applied to them. They say: Just listen for yourself. Months of trying to explain this album to others gave way to me simply pointing to the audio samples. Even a collage of thirty-second snippets speaks louder than any label, and most descriptions too.

I have the equivalent of a whole shelf of music that has nominally been labeled “jazz”, but which could easily sport any of a dozen other categories. Onze Danses has been variously lumped into “jazz”, “world”, “avant-garde”, or that lazy big-box-store catchall “rock”, and while it easily touches down in every single one of those categories it never stays in any one of them long enough to set up housekeeping, or be mistaken for a resident. When writing an earlier draft of this review I came up with the term “gypsy music”, and it stuck.

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This was the first record by Kaoru Abe I ever heard, and from what I can tell it was among the very last recordings he ever made. Barely ten days after this concert, Abe was dead at the age of twenty-nine, a drug casualty — and by all accounts the fact he’d overdosed himself into an early grave was no surprise to anyone who knew him. I don’t hold to the theory that everyone possessed of a fierce creative energy is simultaneously practicing a form of slow self-immolation that may eventually turn out to be a rehearsal for the real thing, but the exceptions, like Abe, cloud our senses to any other possibility if only because they burned so very brightly indeed.

I listened to Last Date for the first time in the middle of the night, at a time when I was in poor spirits and felt like any human contact would only make things worse. Last Date had ended up in my collection after one of my forays through JustTheDisc.com, since the name “Kaoru Abe” was peripherally familiar from my other forays into both free jazz and Japan’s noise underground. Funny how his name turned up in both circles, but at the same time not odd at all: I’ve written before how the distance between something like Coltrane’s “Ascension” and your average Merzbow track is not that far. So I threw the album on, and before long I found myself gripping the sides of my chair and being overwhelmed with a sense of intimacy that I think only Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing has also been able to evoke. Listening to the album was like getting a letter from a dead friend and knowing you could never, ever write back.

Odd, this. I’ve had Toshiyuki Sasagawa’s AQUA=MIZU in my daily playlists for almost two years now without ever eking out a coherent statement about it. I suspect that’s because it’s become such a familiar presence that it’s a little like describing the air. I also suspect talking about it will seem strange because it is so radically out of phase with the other music I tend to write about. What’s a guy who likes Merzbow and Fushitsusha doing writing about an album of soft solo piano that might easily have come from the Windham Hill label?

Well, I have my reasons — and if they seem more like excuses, then excuses they are. It was through folks like the noise-mongers described above that I backtracked into folks like John Cage, and then from Cage into Erik Satie. And from Satie into Harold Budd and Brian Eno, whose The Pearl I managed to listen to for hours on end without ever feeling like I knew where any one song really began or ended, or knowing where the whole record itself was meant to begin or end. It somehow in time became a part of the very environment of the room I was in, as did AQUA=MIZU when I played it. That said, I have to accept the possibility that what I hear in the record is only what I’ve chosen to hear, and that other people are going to simply compare it to all the other piano albums they’ve heard with a picture on the cover of some curtains blowing in the breeze.

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Do you remember Godflesh? I remember Godflesh.

I remember Pure. I still speak of it, without irony, as an album that changed my life. I remember the relentless grinding of the first self-titled album, the utter despondency of Streetcleaner, the uneasy paranoia of Slavestate, and the ups and downs of the rest of the catalog. I also remember grabbing every other project I could find that had Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick credited somewhere on the jacket: Final, Jesu, Techno Animal, God, all of it.Broadrick eventually killed Godflesh and replaced it with Jesu, but the side projects continued to roll along.

Enter Greymachine, which is worth getting excited about due to the presence of a few other people of note: Aaron Turner, of Isis (another metalloid band that someone else once described as “a happier Godflesh”); Diarmuid Dalton, of ‘Flesh and Jesu and Final, as well as the underrated Cable Regime; and Dave Cochrane, most notably of the also-underappreciated Head of David (where Broadrick served as drummer for a time). The end result is a filthy mess of twisted wreckage that brings to mind everything from Broadrick’s early outfit Fall of Because — they existed in parallel with Napalm Death, where Broadrick also briefly appeared, and that alone should tell you what level of ferocity is at play here.

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One way you can tell casual listeners from self-appointed Music Fans: they have weird senses of organization. They are incapable of just filing things alphabetically. For a long time I thought I was the only person on the face of the globe who lined up his CD collection by influence / shared personnel, starting with Swans at one end of the shelf and running through Foetus, Coil, Neubauten, FM Einheit and Caspar Brötzmann and the like before finally ending (collapsing, spent, exhausted, panting) at John Zorn and Naked City. If there’s anything that goes on the shelf after Zorn, I’m not sure I want to hear it without something stiff to drink first.

Then I ran into a fellow music nut with a collection that was organized by label, and I thought: why the heck not? The best record labels, from Stax and Motown and early Atlantic all the way on down to indies like 4AD to cracks in the wall like PSF and Public Bath, are driven by the tastes and selectivity of their owners. You hear what they like to hear. Browse by stable- and label-mates, and you find treasure you might otherwise never blunder across (Last Visible Dog) — or you simply end up wondering how tough it really is to sleaze a recording contract out of some people (Vinyl Communications).

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“As if I ain’t got trouble enough,” sneered Keith Dobson, and then blam — the speakers on my little Sharp brand boombox rattled like someone was raking them with a wire brush. Not that far from the truth, if the rumors were true about how World Domination Enterprises achieved that shearing, sheet-metal guitar sound: by smashing their guitars to pieces and then bolting them back together. Come to think of it, that would make such a move predate Dragon Eye Morrison’s similar speaker-cone-tearing stunt in Electric Dragon 80.000 V by a good fifteen years or so.

WDE were neither the first nor the last band I discovered thanks to WFMU, but they probably rank as one of the two or three noisiest. (#1 slot: Missing Foundation.) The station didn’t come in all that great — they were in East Orange, I was in Teaneck, and the antenna on my radio had suffered a header and didn’t telescope out anymore. Most everything I taped off the air from them was sputtered with a patina of static, but when you were dealing with a band that sounded like a punk drum section providing support for a mixmaster who’d plopped a guitar on his turntable and was raking the needle across the strings, that only made them sound all the better. Dobson didn’t even sound like he was playing that guitar, he sounded like he was letting things escape from it.

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I got into music backwards. I started with the excesses of Merzbow and the murderous overkill of the Swans, and then reversed gears into more conventional territory. And even then I was still going backwards: I didn’t start my Coltrane collection with A Love Supreme, but rather Ascension. By the time I’d fallen back into something like normal territory, my ears had already been prepared for most anything they might encounter.

And yet I keep being surprised — especially by Merzbow himself, whose encyclopedic catalog of releases grows by at least thirty or forty discs a year. There are many releases that repeat each other — I’m not sure the lay listener will sense much difference between Noisembryo and Green Wheels (I do, but that’s another story) — but at this stage in his career he’s found ways to challenge himself and explore new territory all the time, even if only incrementally. To that end, 13 Birds is fast shaping up to be the open-ended successor to all the ideas Merzbow only touched on or hinted at with Door Open At 8AM.

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“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.

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Most anything with the “dark ambient” or “illbient” labels can be traced back to Brian Williams, aka Lustmørd, even if he’s not all that thrilled with such a descriptor. He’s also managed to balance a career of providing scores and effects for Hollywood movies (hey, it’s nice work if you can get it!) with creating albums of music that summon the void in the space between your speakers. It wasn’t hard for me to become a fan of his work — it got to the point where all he had to do was wave a hand in the general direction of a record and I’d pick it up.

That explains how I ended up with some of the more truly curious records in his catalog. Exhibit A for the prosecution: his strange techno / dance / illbient (ill-beat-i-ent?) one-off project Terror Against Terror (Psychological Warfare Technology Systems) so named for a track from one of his earlier discs, and which due to record-label incompetence ended up floating around in limbo for almost four years. Exhibit B: this even more oddball disc, “an ode to the terrible cost of society’s love affair with cars”, as Soleilmoon’s press release put it.

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Boris win some kind of award for truth in advertising with their album titles: Amplifier Worship, Rock Dream, and now Feedbacker. This is rock ‘n roll from Japan’s deepest underground live halls, drenched in (as the name implies) feedback, rattle-and-hum, and buzz. That’s buzz in all senses of the word “buzz” — both the drug-induced kind and what you get out of a guitar stack when it’s not grounded properly. Not that such a thing would be an impediment here, since the meters on the control board were probably pegged in the red for most of the recording session anyway.

Some history. Once upon a time, when dinosaurs walked the earth and I lived close enough to WFMU in New Jersey to hear their broadcasts the old-fashioned way, I got plenty of education from them into what constituted noise-rock at the time. For most folks, this sort of thing started and ended with Sonic Youth, but the rabbit hole went a lot deeper than that: To Live And Shave In L.A., F/i, and a great many others since buried and forgotten. Other people heard a wall of fuzz and garbage; I heard sonic exploration that primed me for Coltrane’s “Ascension” and Scriabin’s Final Mystery, and which in some ways had already been anticipated by the screeching crescendos of György Ligeti on the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey.