boris with merzbow: rock dream
sweet jeebus it’s here….
ultraheavyweight purple triple vinyl stephen o’malley styled inch thick gatefold diecut seventies-tastic sleeve thousand limited pure fucking wonderous beauty.
this is so ridiculously awesome i am genuinely flabbergasted. struggling to type with shaking twiglike fingers as thirty five minutes of feedbacker crackles and lunges like some seasick wet dream from the speakers. i have the same nervous queasy near sexual excitement listening to this as i did digging through my old dads’ king crimson and black sabbath lp’s as an impressionable youngster.
i’ve heard chatter claiming it’s just boris live with merzbow doing his usual destrucktion electronicks in the background. these people? these people are goddam fools. with peasized heads. and their bits are all wrong. it works (as it has done (sometimes) on previous collaborations) in the middle ground where rock and noise meet and have a quick fondle then retreat back to their bedrooms for some selfabuse. except here, here the fondle turns into one massive almost two hour mutual orgy of pure psyche love, recorded live for (y)our pleasure in tokyo two thousand and six.
somehow performing the jeebus style magic of making the sunn O))) / earth collaboration seem almost blah (not really, but by christ this really is awe-inspiring).
somehow managing the contradictory impossibility of being gloriously dense and subtle while simultaneously bludgeoning yr skull to soft mush.
somehow performing the even more impressive jeebus style magic of making merzbow something to enjoy rather than to hold on and gawp at in aurally abused bemusement.
somehow.
the guitars are as fuzzed up, down tuned and clamorous as ever. and if merzbow sounds as if he’s forever locked in some ferocious epic battle with electricity, wata sounds as if she’s channelling it. and thanks to a cracking mix you get to hear both textured kschzzingingskreeeeeing explosions synergising in some (un)holy, (un)godly way.
unlike, say sun baked snow cave, which despite being a boris collaboration was an atypical merzbow endurance test of wonderfully mammoth distorto non-music, rock dream benefits from the structure of the boris originals. and in harnessing the muscularly mental merzbow flow (apologies for the alliteration) the songs are in turn ridiculously energised, tooled up and ready to beat you round the head. the thirteen minutes of just abandoned my-self will flick a switch in your brain that will either a) change the way you look at everything in the goddam universe or b) make your head hurt, ears bleed and force you to black out the previous thirteen minutes of your life, replacing it with a more palatable thirteen minutes of saved by the bell (the one where skreech and mr belding become lovers, perhaps).
if i may, for a second, use the word transcendent. in every adjective synonymous sense.
transcendent.
boris with merzbow: black out
merzbow: elephant song
