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.

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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.