TIME IS RUNNING OUT. NOISE IS MUSIC.

 

After many years of listening to (enduring? surviving?) Merzbow, I've come to realize that for the most part I tend to enjoy his collaborations and splits more than I enjoy his solo material.  I have to be in a very specific mood to handle the Japanese God of Noise's all-out aural overkill, but when there is another artist present to balance him out, it tends to make things a bit more palatable.

Such is the case with Retribution By All Other Creatures, the latest release from Merzbow and long-running California noise-agitators Bastard Noise.  The album is billed as a collaboration, but the promo I received didn't include any credits, so I'm not sure if the artists actually guested on each others' material, or if this is just a more traditional split release.  Whatever the case, it's easily one of the most unsettling things I've had the (dis)pleasure of listening to in 2022.

Bastard Noise kick things off with "Animals Running Human Factory Farms" a lumbering behemoth of a track that mainly alternates between creepy dark ambient and sounding like a malfunctioning eighties arcade game (think something like Galaga or Qbert) melting as it's being lowered into a vat of acid.  The song also features some totally sick vocals from head Bastard Eric Wood that sound like a 'luded out Dr. Claw ("I'll get you next time Gadget, next time!"). In other words, it's totally fucking awesome and is probably the best track on the album.

Next up is the amazingly titled "This is How Human Waste Rolls," which uses pretty much the same sound palette as the first track, but feels even more jarring as it moves between deep, cavernous vocals and walls of punishing noise that are likely to cause a brain bleed if you listen too loudly on earbuds (fortunately I've learned my lesson over the years and had my volume turned way down).  About halfway through, the track goes (mostly) quiet before building itself back up layer by jagged layer to assault the ears once more during its final stretch.

Merzbow's first track "ZooNosISE PART 1," surprises by not being nearly as harsh as I was expecting it to be. Granted, there's no way that I (or probably any halfway sane person, for that matter) can keep up with Merzbow's roughly five billion releases per year, so perhaps I'm just not privy to how his sound has evolved over the years.  The song is almost soothing, as opposed to the steel wool scrubbing of the inner ear that I'm accustomed to, even as it slowly morphs into total industrial cacophony.  Just when you think you've got Merzbow pegged, he pulls a another surprise out of his six pulse demon bag.

The relative mellowness of Merzbow's opening salvo is quickly made up for on "ZooNosISE PART 2," which proves to be quite the endurance test right out of the gate, as all manner of metallic scrapes, scratches and screeches come hurtling out of the mix to decimate your earholes.  This track feels a bit more like the Merzbow I'm most familiar with, the Merzbow that blew my mind with classic releases such as Venereology and Hybrid Noisebloom.  The track becomes almost playful about halfway through with lots of high pitched chirps before slowing to a droning, crackling crawl of glitchy fuzz in its last minutes.

At just over an hour, Retribution By All Other Creatures is a hell of a lot of noise and probably not the best place to start for beginners, but fans of Merzbow and Bastard Noise will find much to enjoy within the album's sometimes cold and cavernous, sometimes violent and punishing confines. Overall, this is a damn fine release and I think it's pretty damn cool that the folks at Relapse Records continue to rekindle their relationship with Merzbow after many years spent ignoring their legacy as a pioneering label for noise and experimental music in North America.  Buy and die.