WRESTLING WITH GLUTTONY: TAKESHITA – ‘DUMMY NOISE’ [2023]

Meet Mr. Garg, the elusive creature behind monikers like Kwashiorkor, Pizza Burrito, and the grandiose Cloak of Displacement. Under the alias Takeshita, he unleashes wrestling-flavored cacophonies on the unsuspecting masses. The album ‘Dummy Noise’ is a bizarre dedication to Yoshihiko, an inflatable sex doll turned wrestling sensation for the Dramatic Dream Team in Japan. Yes, you read that right – an inflatable sex doll in the wrestling ring. Move over, Hulk Hogan.

Further, this record boldly proposes that ‘Harsh noise is Free Jazz’ and tries to prove this daring hypothesis with about an hour’s worth of material. True to form, this high-concept album is a chaotic wrestling match – ‘Yoshihiko vs. Kota Ibushi‘ features crowd noises colliding with spastic drum fills, creating an atmosphere that’s like stumbling upon a band’s wild soundcheck. This opening track is genuinely cool but overstays its welcome at seven minutes. Think of it as the musical equivalent of a wrestler flexing for way too long.

Now, let’s talk about ‘Spinning Head Scissors,‘ where Takeshita generously throws in a bunch of bleeps and bloops, like a digital rendition of a toddler playing with a shiny new toy. It’s not exactly a spectacle – more like the auditory equivalent of finding spare change in your couch cushions. Not groundbreaking, but hey, it doesn’t make you cringe either. A solid “meh.”

And then we dive headfirst into the abyss of ‘Untranspressive Transpression.’ This track features various chopped-up vocals narrating absurdities about a gig in ‘CHICK-A-GO’. It’s like listening to the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist who stumbled upon a thesaurus. Cool concept, but spoiler alert: it’s about as drawn-out as a lecture on the history of lint.

Now we come to the heart of the album, a noise jam called ‘Yoshihiko’s Journey’ that lasts a whopping 16 minutes. Imagine a hypnotic blend of synth flickering, a symphony of beeps and boops, and various noise movements that’ll make your eardrums do somersaults. It’s like Takeshita decided to throw a carnival for your senses, and you’re not just a spectator – you’re getting body slammed by a sex doll.  ‘Yoshihiko’s Journey‘ boldly steps into the ring with the heavyweights, earning a spot up there with the best of Merzbow. Yes, you heard it right – Takeshita is flexing those noise muscles, proudly claiming a throne next to the maestro of cacophony himself

Now the album is running on full steroid infused stream! “Sax Doll” emerges as a standout, with electronic chops, echo-laden saxophone riffs, and a disorienting atmosphere. The sax solo is sliced, delayed, and layered, creating walls of sound that feel both surreal and captivating. Another banger! Takeshita is on the juice!

But beware of ‘Inflatable Sticks & Stones,‘ a track that’s pure filler, a gluttonous addition to the buffet. This is followed by ‘Not a Sex Doll‘ featuring iwkok$10 – a LightningBolt-esque freakout set to noise. The tragedy lies in the sporadic moments of brilliance, drowned out by long passages that sound like simultaneous clashes of disparate tracks that mix like oil and water. It’s like trying to appreciate a Picasso painting while someone’s aggressively playing hopscotch on the canvas. Someone get the editing scissors – trim the fat, trim it now!

‘Yoshihiko vs. Minora Suzuki Dream Match,‘ unfortunately, follows suit as another filler track, lacking substance. It acts as a palate cleanser after the dense freakout before it.

And now, drumroll, please! We reach the grand finale – ‘Yoshihiko’s Siren Call.’ A sparse and ominous soundscape into the abyss of creaking noise and infernal Japanese moaning. It’s like stumbling into a haunted kabuki theater, where the ghostly performers traded their traditional instruments for an arsenal of dissonant noise.  This track is a journey where the lack of a clear rhythm wraps you in a tense atmosphere, gripping your attention like a suspenseful thriller. It’s like Takeshita handed the director’s baton to Hitchcock and said, “Make it weird, but make it captivating.” 

And so the curtains close on this avant-garde spectacle, ‘Yoshihiko’s Siren Call‘ manages to conclude the album on a high note – a note so high, even Mariah Carey would give it a nod of approval. It’s the musical equivalent of the wrestling sex doll deflating in the ring, bidding farewell after a decade of brawling. Picture an entire card of wrestlers solemnly putting the inflatable warrior to rest, as if it were the end of an era. Takeshita, you’ve managed to give a wrestling sex doll a fitting send-off, and for that, we salute you in the most avant-garde way possible.

Overall, ‘Dummy Noise‘ deserves a solid 7.5/10. Cut out the filler tracks, and you’ve got yourself a noise record that’s not just a banger – it’s a sonic knockout waiting to happen.

Available on CD and as digital download here:
https://ruralisolationproject.bandcamp.com/album/takeshita-dummy-noise

MARTÍN ESCALANTE / TETÉ LEGUÍA / WEASEL WALTER – ‘KATYUSHA’

3 long tracks of multi-directional improvisational malfeasance to the destroy the illusion, reality shaking expressions of exuberance, power and lunacy. Totalitarian, maximalist torrent of free improvisation, an explosively intense expression of Free Jazz, a wordless primal scream dialed to 11 and vibrating with humming radioactive power. Delicacy and intonation wither like prone digits in a subzero torrent. Weasel pummels and plummets down the stairs in bursts of terminal velocity, crashing through the firmament with fearsome idiot energy and incredibly dexterous, choppy runs full of off-kilter hyper blast beats and endless rolling double bass. Leguía applies a tormenting, synapse poisoning saxophone performance best experienced behind bulletproof glass, each singing, stinging, screaming volley forced into life, choked and strangled, threatening to destroy your precious inner ear, and Escalante conjures a bass performance of the unfathomable, an iron curtain falling in plumes and rotten ruffles, coiling and piling beneath and amidst the insane percussion. Quieter moments serve to wane the friction and crank up the foul ambiance of these three demons at work(&play). A maelstrom of hyperkinetic aplomb and sweat-soaked interactive fervor, challenging and socially challenged. If you enjoy Painkiller era Zorn, Sissy Spacek or Peter Brötzmann, seek no further. Entirely essential, fun as fuck.

ugEXPLODE

PING PONG SELF TITLED

Rome-based imprint Raw Culture isn’t exactly renowned for its conservatism but the astonishing new album from Italian duo Andrea Renzini and Stephano Passini pushes the boat so far out it disappears over the horizon and gets crushed to matchwood by an alien species of squid. Lashed together from field recordings of Korean table tennis matches and a bijouterie of bizarre instrumentation (filter bag, aerosol flute, yoga balls), ‘Ping Pong’ is a riot of gnarly free jazz and motorik machine funk that charges, battering ram in hand, at the portal to a future of infinite possibility. The four pressurised jams that comprise the album’s A side (‘Master Ping’) showcase the band at its most organic and untamed. Cacophonous drum cannonades delineate a sequence of volatile grooves made all the more unstable by the miasma of caterwauling sonic detritus through which they corkscrew. It’s an outlandishly heady concoction, but the flip (‘Master Pong’, natch) is where Ping Pong’s singular vision comes fully into focus. Homing in on an irresistible sour spot ‘twixt Föllakzoid’s virulent technoid krautrock and the clammy sleaze-disco shenanigans of Decius, tracks like ‘Zilch’ and the jaw-dropping ‘Welcome’ are crammed with spadefuls of such dizzying detail they could trigger synaesthesia in a breeze block. Despite closing out with ‘Future’, a garish synth-punk hoedown that sticks out like a pilchard in a blancmange, there’s a pervasive sense here that Ping Pong are hovering on the cusp of a giant evolutionary leap; a metamorphosis into some higher, deeper and more vaporous form even they can’t conceive of. For now though, this is more than sufficient. Keep watching the skies.

Raw Culture

THE DWARFS OF EAST AGOUZA – ‘HIGH TIDE IN THE LOWLANDS’

The Dwarfs Of East Agouza are a criminally undervalued avant-garde power trio whose arabesque synthesis of West African free jazz and krautrock has precious few parallels in 21st century music. Comprised of Cairo-based composer Maurice Louca, Land Of Kush guitarist Sam Shalabi and Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls notoriety, the band’s modus operandi is mind expansion via the scenic route, a fact nowhere better exemplified than on their latest, and arguably most ear-boggling album to date. Recorded live in Brussels, ‘High Tide In The Lowlands’ manifests as two 20+ minute excursions through a teeming jungle of polychromatic sound that once entered blocks off all clear avenues of escape. Zone in or zone out, these are trips where the destination may be predetermined but the satnav has been sabotaged. Opener ‘Baka Of The Future’ ignites in a sunburst of Eastern guitar curlicues before a fitful motorik groove propels the track across the entropy Rubicon and it begins unravelling, tendrils of atonal ambience snagging at the synapses until disorientation sets in. ‘The Sprouting Of The 7th Enterainment’ follows a similar but even more tortuous path, variously channelling the spirits of Damo Suzuki, Sun Ra and Mulatu Astatke whilst remaining wholly placeless and divorced from obvious influence. Like the oeuvres of other absconders from the plane of premeditation (Skull Mask, The Necks) this is music that has magnitude but not direction; scalar fields of pulsating noise that teeter on the brink of complete abstraction yet grip like a vice from first minute to last. The Dwarfs are cruising some strange spaceways here. Hitch a ride.

Sub Rosa Label

WATARU NOMURA – ‘WIPE KARMA’

An intoxicating, sultry abstract Jazz mix from hidden form Wataru Nomura – expertly selected, brilliant weird Jazz cuts and Ambience to get you contact stoned, totally inverse and extrospective abstract perspectives on dissonance and quiet. Being the novice that I am, I’m not familiar with all of the artists involved, so I can’t offer insights relative to their individual discographies beyond the obvious and easily researched. Paul Bley’s ‘Albert’s Love Theme’ opens the suite with spectral piano and bass groan, oblique and ponderous, flowing into some masterly percussion and Sax entanglements, stepping and dancing, leading to explorations of fusion types and Free Jazz improvisational expressions. Eddies of lone percussive motions and arcing slews of reverberating noises, spectral and diasporic horns, licks of field recordings, tracks flowing from form abstraction to formless reverie. Furthest out!

Bandcamp

EATERS OF THE SOIL – ‘E.P. 2’

The permeability of the membrane that separates jazz from extreme metal has been increasing exponentially of late. From the cosmic overload of Neptunian Maximalism to Starboard’s funereal chamber doom, the slew of exotic new hybrids birthed by this osmotic pressure drop haven’t just rattled the odd cage, they’ve permanently altered the contours of an entire sonic landscape. As their name suggests, Dutch improv trio Eaters Of The Soil inhabit the dankest antechambers of the jazz/metal basilica, chiseling angular monoliths of ear-scouring discord from fretless bass, guitar, synth and trombone. The album-length sequel to last year’s riveting self-titled debut, ‘E.P. 2’ is a case study in nuanced cacophony that, despite its often pulverising heaviness, shows scant regard for the protocols of doom. Expect nothing so conventional as a riff here, just boulder upon boulder of sedimentary noise whose cumulative effect mirrors the Sisyphean slab-dragging of hardline sludgemongers like Primitive Man and Body Void. Jazz is likewise stretched way beyond its elastic limit, plumes of overblown brass erupting from plateau of bass-stiffened ambient grind that thrum like a vast network of conjoined substations. Tumours of forlorn melody grow briefly in the gloom only to be excised by scissoring blasts of dissonance, whilst snatches of dialogue apparently culled from interviews with a serial killer only deepen the sinkhole of unease this nerve-shredding noise-fest opens up. Join the feeding frenzy.

Forbidden Place Records

GOLDEN CAT PAGODA – ‘ENTROPY’

There’s a strange irony in the fact that as black metal hurtles towards middle age, it’s the genre’s least orthodox practitioners (Cloak Of Altering, Sleepwalker, the magnificently deranged Mamaleek, et al) who, in spirit if not sound, seem most to embody its founding principles of dissidence and extremity. Take – if your constitution can handle it – Vancouver-based Golden Cat Pagoda 金猫塔, a one-man(iac) fever dream generator who, rather than play footsie with the corpse-painted avatar of tradition, spikes its drink with adrenochrome then abandons it gibbering and paranoid in the mirror maze of a derelict funhouse. Warped and contorted into outlandish configurations, the black metal of ‘Entropy 熵’ (an apposite title if ever there was one) is a miasmic morass of paradox and incongruity where genre touchstones like blast beats and tremolo riffs are reduced to bit part status and chaos of an altogether more inscrutable kind reigns supreme. Lean in close (but not TOO close, mind) and the glistening innards of this nightmarish sinfonietta come fully into focus; sibilant vocals that percolate like gas bubbles through radioactive glycerine, acrid geysers of darkside vaporwave and jazz-mangled crypto-prog, and as if that wasn’t enough, a brief but utterly unhinged foray into no-fi surf rock that has more in common with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns than Gorgoroth. ‘Entropy’ may not be cvlt in the inflexible sense perpetuated by legions of identikit second wavers, but as an exemplar of black metal’s transgressive ideals, it’s as authentic as it gets. Essential.

Pest Productions

Bandcamp