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.

“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.

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.

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.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear something akin to a György Ligeti choral piece being performed on the rim on an active volcano, look no further than this collaboration between two of the most … um, explosive artists of the Japanese underground. Keiji Haino, the guitar god and self-described “bluesman” who sounds like he hails from somewhere around beyond the orbit of Pluto; and Masami Akita, a/k/a Merzbow, whose rumblings and seismic disturbances turn feedback and speaker blowout into art forms unto themselves. Haino’s the master of the monochromatic and mournful; Merzbow covers the ears with a Pollock-splatter of sounds in all spectra. A collaboration between them was bound to be epic in some way.

Pulverized Purple does not disappoint, at least in the sense that it shows both parties doing what they do best and at the fullest possible volume. Come to think of it, “Pulverized” is the right word: it’s the best adjective for what they do to the sounds they create between them, and also what happens to the listener. Akita-the-irresistable-force and Haino-the-immovable-object smash together again and again, grinding the audience into atoms between them. But beyond the obvious my-noise-album-can-beat-up-your-noise-album one-upsmanship, Purple also shows off the more careful and considered sides of both parties: Haino’s eternal straining for some emotion that words and music alone don’t encapsulate, and Akita’s amazing sense of spontaneity and intuitive composition.

Really, this is where it all started with me. Before Godflesh and Merzbow, before Meat Beat Manifesto and Suicide, before John Cage even, there was Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte, recorded over fifty years ago and yet still sounding timeless. Our ears, as Cage himself said, are now in excellent condition.

Aside from being a groundbreaking piece of electronic music — probably the single most important piece of its kind, second only to Stockhausen’s earlier Song of the Youths (which isn’t nearly as impressive or ambitious to me) — Kontakte has something of the flavor of an epic film that would be unrealizable on any budget in today’s world. The whole of Kontakte had been made by taking electronic pulses and manipulating them on tape, processing them with a limited battery of studio effects, and then splicing together and re-recording the results — a process which took two years of work in the WDR Köln studio to pull off. Given that the piece runs 35 minutes total, that meant the average day’s work for Stockhausen yielded up maybe two and a half seconds of sound. It was the sonic version of stop-motion animation — or maybe Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking, which he accomplished by painting and etching directly onto the film itself.

It’s like a cross between a funeral procession, a live performance of The Doors’s “The End” taken to its furthest possible extreme, and the incendiary rantings of a street-corner prophet. J.A. Seazer’s Kokkyō Junreika (“A Pilgrimage Across National Borders”) distills most if not all of the glorious excess from the career of one of Japan’s counter-culture rock gods. It’s not a compilation record, but it might as well be — most everything you’d hear in a J.A. Seazer production is all here, in one 53-minute package. Invocations to the gods, tantrums, chants, Buddhist mantras, cries to the heavens, fuzztone guitar vamps — it’s all here.

And yet it all doesn’t sound like an embarrassing leftover from the acid era; it sounds ageless instead of aged. I’ve argued with friends about whether or not this is ethnocentric — i.e., does it sound that much more powerful and exotic by dint of simply not being in English? I don’t think so. There’s something about the way Japan continually transmutes its spiritual roots into popular culture of one kind or another, all without seeming to cheapen it or turn it into just another roadside attraction. When “outsider folk” artists like Shuji Inaba, Kazuki Tomokawa or Kan Mikami (a frequent Seazer collaborator) step up and deliver with speaker-cone-tearing vigor, they transmit something not only deeply felt but deeply believed. It’s not slumming.

“the listeners of these recordings will always enjoy the most intense reactions of all because they are the most violently repulsive records ever conceived”

So read the text that accompanied Whitehouse’s Buchenwald album, an LP so loud that I feared for the needle flying right out of the groove. The same disclaimer might well have been applied to 150 Murderous Passions, a 1981 joint project between Whitehouse and Nurse with Wound which works for reasons other than pure volume overload. It is genuinely frightening music. I bought it and played it on a day when no one else happened to be in the house, and it almost drove me out into the street. It was and still is as emotionally battering as Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” or Ligeti’s “Atmospheres”.

Now that I think about it, Passions has a good deal more in common with the works of those composers than anything else Whitehouse or NWW did before or since. The fact that “Hiroshima” or “Atmospheres” used nothing more than orchestra to accomplish what they do is astounding, but that doesn’t make Passions’s use of tapes, found sounds, noise and studio techniques any less fearsome. It is one long, undulating shriek of horror — or maybe ecstasy, given that the title and many of the references within the record trace right back to Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Excerpts from the book can be heard read here and there, but the text isn’t crucial to appreciating any of the emotional effects generated by the record — it’s just the starting point, maybe something to meditate on casually while you’re being bludgeoned by what you hear.

The flaw itself which has been born
can become bigger than the flaw which bore it
Because I myself loved too much the universe itself,
saying "I love you", I will continue to curse myself …

The legacy of Fushitsusha ("The Unlost") and Keiji Haino spans over thirty years, with a trail of recordings that even the most die-hard record collectors have had trouble following. The jet-black sound (and look!) of these records is unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Haino himself resisted the CD re-release of the legendary original PSF 3/4 album for quite some time, presumably to preserve the mystique associated with it. When it came out on CD at last, however, none of the Haino mystique was diminished in the slightest. In fact, each subsequent Haino/Fushitsusha release, old or new, only serves to enhance it all the more.

This isn't to say that every piece of Haino/Fushitsusha vinyl (or polycarbonate) is perfect. Some of them are downright boring and self-indulgent — and I'm sorry if I'm stepping on any Haino-worshipper's toes here, but there's a line to be drawn between "exploration" and "wankery." I thought Watashi-dake? was a tough sell, a very primordial Haino gagging and whispering — too "formative years" for all but the most devoted, something to experience after . Pathetique isn't perfect, but it has a huge helping of the same energy and fire that fueled their very best albums (like 15/16, for instance).

Dad and I always used the same things for different ends. When he bought a shortwave radio, he listened to the BBC World Service and whatever Turkish-language broadcasts he could pick up. I listened to the atmospherics and the numbers stations. When he bought a CD player, he played CDs on it. I also played CDs on it, and used the pause button and jog dial to create my own impromptu remixes. Small wonder I ended up a Merzbow fan; all of Masami Akita’s records have the feeling of snapping on a shortwave radio inside your head and tuning it to the sound of the atmospherics coming out of his head.

Door Open at 8 AM has that station-between-the-stations feeling throughout: it’s a mixture (Mixtur, ha ha) of jazz/prog-rock record samples and seething, shearing electronics plus live-action recordings. It’s roughly closest in spirit to Merzbeat, both in the nature of the material transformed and the way the transformations play out. It hasn’t yet grown on me the way Merzbuddha and Yoshinotsune have, but I know it will — Merzbow’s music requires that you approach with empty hands, or you never seize it for yourself. It’s music you listen into, not just music you listen to.