Maaaa/K2 — Split
Russian (albeit currently located in Poland) duo Maaaa opens the dance with five tracks of extremely well composed and fierce harsh noise. The first track "Entomophobia" starts with an impressive insect buzzing sound that reminded me for a second of Randy Yau and Dave Phillips' collaboration. The rest is a pure, brutal harsh noise assault. Very aggressive, distorted metal junk and feedback, excellent metallic sound looping and white noise. Frankly I couldn't ask for more to an album starter!
Maaaa's contribution continues with a wide spectrum of classic noise weapons of choice: "Crude Petroleum" features ultra crude crackling distortion and pulsating space synth looping and sounds; "Eastern Bloc" gives us more psychedelic synth sputtering; “Drunken Skinhead”
is a big mess of glass shattering, metal junk sounds and distorted frequencies; “The Puke” is a short blast of nasty buzzing synth and feedback.
All of Maaa's tracks are quite short, the longest marking at little more than five minutes, and each of them is a solid composition. I can't recall many harsh noise acts from the last few years that managed to pull off such good and well thought short blasts of pure sound, so hats off to Maaaa! These guys definitely deserve more attention.
After the Karelian torture of Maaaa, it's the turn of the Japanese Emperor of junk metal manipulation Kimihide Kusafuka, aka K2. The three tracks presented on this CD don't feature any junk metal sounds though, as Mr. Kusafuka goes out to specify in the booklet. Maybe he
wants to move away from a comfortable area and explore other things?. Indulging and reveling in layer over layer of synthesizer abuse, K2's sounds here are unusually rough, nasty and pretty different from his other material I'm familiar with. All the three tracks seem cut out of long synth/junk electronics improvisations and include all the right ingredients for a good harsh noise mix: piercing high frequency sounds, lightning-fast shifts of direction and sound, fucked up vocals, a certain sadistic pleasure in torturing the listener's ears with pure feedback and most of all layers and layers of synth devastation. There's a great variety of timbre, grain, “rhythm” and frequency but not all the sounds obtained are completely successful. I'm thinking especially about the unavoidable occurance of toy laser-like blasts and delay pedal fuckery, but in the end it's a just matter of personal taste. K2's tracks are simple, almost stripped down to the core and the quality of recording is very raw, which also is quite unusual for classic Japanese artists. In conclusion, his “Izanagi Mix”, “Boosted Magatamania” and “The Hole Of Ootakimaru” are
good rough harsh noise. Of course the world needs more of this!
Last but not least: the artwork. The tiny booklet looks really good, especially because of the transparent pages. Excellent design. I must say that this time the match is won by the Russian couple simply because their tracks are fucking great, but this split CD is very good from start to finish. Recommended to all fans of harsh noise.