Merzbow - Music for Bondage Performance (V)

Of all the Merzbow I've heard so far, Music for Bondage Performance is definitely my favorite. Rather than the harsh, crackling, grinding electronics that dominate so much of noise and even Merzbow's work, Music for Bondage Performance blends noise with softer ambiance and percussion.

"Hara-Kiri Video" features layers of pulsing interacting polyrhythmically with a slow, steady bass drum and swells and clicks and aching ambiance. "Seishi Seppuku Kei" extends the acoustic side of the performance with clashing, echoing percussive crashes vibrations, and scrapes mingling bizarrely over a distant constant tone and arrhythmic heartbeat-like pulses that build and shift and change their context. Over its ten-minute span, it abandons the emphasis on experimental percussion in favor of more shifting, swelling, almost-tones and sustained noises. "Ropes in Tears" builds on tone clusters of tuned percussion and again slowly falls apart into ambience and almost subliminal scrapes and creaks. "Aimei Nawa" builds noise around its ambiance with tone loops, more strange percussive loops, and eventually fearful scraping of a bow on strings that brings to mind one of the poems, "Serenade," from Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire: "With a giant bow grotesquely/Scrapes Pierrot on his viola . . . " in its harsh strains. "Lost Paradise" is a brief venture into chaotically jangling bells that somehow doesn't seem out of place transitioning to the 26-minute "Bondage Performances," a soundscape of not only the shifting tones that dominate this album, but almost noisy, reverberating drums. This track wanders everywhere, combining field recordings of knocking and barking dogs and distant voices and brass instruments and strange loops and crashing blasts of noise and little melodies. Even through broken-sounding keyboard glurps and bleeps and frenetic drumming and mad grinding.

Music for Bondage Performance is much more artistic and advanced than the average noise release, softer, more ambient, but yet just as tense and wild and random. If you want to look into a strange mindscape, look no further. If you want an expansion of what noise is, look here. If you want noise spirit without harsh ear abuse, this is the album to put on.