Using turntables, modular gear, and percussion, Joke Lanz & Thomas Rehnert have crafted a release comprised of two very long tracks, each of which is like an accelerationist manifesto on how to combat the culture industry of drifting attention: outrun the bastards! As the title of their join effort portends, Combination Without Repetition, the gauntlet has been thrown. Never let any moment of sonic expression reach a point of repeatability, lest the army of Ritalin-addled nippers get their way. What does this all mean, you might ask? Well, the 33 minutes that make up this work leave absolutely no room for getting into a groove, anticipating what comes next, because Lanz and Rehnhert amputate any morsel of potential auditory pleasure before it can become a "thing", the sonic form of an object or stable entity. This makes for difficult listening, to be sure, but if you can read a little, the duo are pretty upfront about their intentions, and the work that went into crafting such a frenetic journey is worth paying attention to, even if it hurts and you just want to turn the damn thing off (I know I did).
In the dictionary of improvisational ideas, there is Masami Akita (aka Merzbow) as a pioneer of the horror vacui aesthetic (i.e., plentitude ad infinitum), but that is an entirely different beast. Lanz and Rehnhert are perfectly willing to let you hear the individual sound sources for what they are, but these are then so quickly diverted and repurposed that there is no space for listening, no comfy armchair to settle into, which makes the approach all the more infuriating, and I guess that's very much the point. I cannot summarize or provide a rational narrative for what transpires over the two tracks, both because of the impossibility of measuring enough distance between myself and the album, and more importantly, because to do so would enact a kind of violence to the process to which the two musicians have committed themselves. As I noted, this does not make for an enjoyable listen, but once the process reveals itself, all that is left is the grimy desire to subvert the anticipatory structure of time, to embrace (or reject) the event horizon as it is, without parsing it into digestible nuggets of sonic information.
Fans of process-heavy improvisation will most likely find something redeeming here, even if that means you just can't bear to keep on listening. Others may just jump off the train, knowing full well that the impulse to do so is still Lanz and Rehnhert's system. For
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