Mukqs — Jaki Crush
Right out the gates and I know I’m going to be enjoying this ride. Jaki Crush features 8 tracks of lo-fi, free-wheeling sound collage, constructed with bits and scraps of warbly noise detritus, casio jams, damaged beats, ambient segues, primitive percussive parts, cassette manipulation, junk metal clang bang, glitchy computer noise and all sorts of looping goobly gook for starters. His weapon of choice is a cassette 4 track and a stereo looping pedal, which Allison wields with great precision. Kazumoto Endo's While You Were Out and Aaron Dilloway's Modern Jester are listed as reference points in the artist blurb, which makes sense, but I’m also reminded of John Wiese’s Soft Punk and strangely enough Fantomas’ Suspended Animation (you know if loose all the proper musical parts and just focused on the weird, jovial samples). The way Allison hops so seamlessly from eerie casio jams to deconstructed atari noise to something approaching proper instrumentation, is no easy feat, but he does so rather whimsically.
Out of curiosity, I looked up Jaki Crush to get some insight into the album title name. I come to find that it was the 3rd part of a trilogy of video pinball games. The first 2 titles in the series were Alien Crush and Devil’s Crush, which were released in the U.S. on the Turbografx 16 video game console. I was a huge TG-16 nerd and played the first 2 titles more hours than I can count. Apparently, Jaki Crush was only released in Japan. That little factoid really has no bearing on this review and might have no bearing on this album, but I suspect it’s more than a
coincidence.
I’ve collected a number of No Rent offerings and have yet to be let down by a release they’ve published. Count Jaki Crush as another one in the win column.