Scott listens to Merzbow, Pt.2
I love getting my hair washed at a salon. You lean back, close your eyes, and... ahhhhhh.... White noise fills your ears as the water comes on, and as you relax the stylist gets to work and you get the rhythmic movement of their hands but never quite in the same place on your head. Thereâs an underlying constant in the sound of the water, but the semi-predictable tactile sensations add another dimension, and these in turn affect the sound of the water in unexpected ways.
Dharma is a bit like that, except the sensations all happen inside your head.
It was released in 2001, two years into Merzbowâs âlaptop eraâ, and so it feels more deliberately arranged than his â90s work. Every loop or layer is introduced just one or two at a time, and there are rarely more than 3 or 4 different sounds playing at once. It still has the sporadic changes, but it has very few of the half-second âwhat happened there?â moments that populate his earlier work, moments that come out of dealing with finicky and imprecise analogue equipment.
The lack of randomness isnât a bad thing, however. You can very clearly hear just about everything that happens within the mix after relatively few listens; the pleasure with this album is examining those relative few layers in microscopic detail. On the first track for example, âIâm Coming to the Garden..... No Sound, No Memoryâ, within the opening stream of icy static, you can very faintly hear the reverse-piano sample that becomes the focus of the composition later on. That sample is then distorted and mutated in a whole range of different ways, and hearing how it mixes and mingles with the surrounding static makes for a strange, horror-inflected opener.
âAkashimanâ is a much more traditional Merzbow track -a bombardment of various shades of static noise- followed by âPiano Space for Marimo Kittyâ which operates much the same way as the first track: A piano loop surrounded by digital din. It isnât just a rehash though: it uses a few different piano loops, and has a much clearer rise and fall of tension throughout.
What I like generally about the first three tracks on Dharma is their relative brevity (5-8 minutes) and that even while fairly âstandardâ for Merzbow, they unfold at a slower pace than usual. As I said earlier, it really lets you carefully examine everything thatâs happening in the mix. There are unexpected and dizzying moments, but you never feel overwhelmed.
These three tracks are well done, but theyâre ancillary to the real centrepiece of Dharma, the final half-hour entitled âFrozen Guitars and Sunloop / 7E 802âł. The first ~13-minute section continues the âsample surrounded by staticâ pattern of the first 3 tracks, but it feels so much bigger than that. The two samples in question are a warm two-note synth drone (the âSunloopâ?) surrounded by rotating sonar-like âpingsâ that sound like noise of a space station in orbit (the â7E 802âł?). Whatâs different is that these samples arenât transformed as in âIâm Coming to the Gardenâ or âPiano Spaceâ, they remain constantly in the background, and get quieter and quieter as the remaining noise gets more and more intense. Feeling the increasing distance between these two sounds, gives you the feeling that youâre floating in zero-gravity, further and further away from the sun-bathed comfort of your celestial home. Eventually you lose sight of your origin completely, the Sunloop is silent and Merzbow turns your attention to where youâre drifting now.
The closing drone is probably too long, at over 18 minutes, but man, itâs a masterwork of audio design. Itâs this hollowed-out digital static, with maybe an echo on top? or some other carefully blended reverberated tones in background? Regardless, Iâm pretty sure Merzbow is experimenting with Shepard tones in some way, cause I get this constant feeling of descent like being slowly..... slowly pulled into a black hole, watching matter stretch out further and further as you inch closer and closer. Different stellar objects get pulled in view, and you watch them slowly be ripped apart and sucked in. There are parts of this drone where you can feel that something is changing, but canât quite put your finger on what. Skipping through the track, you can hear clear differences from one minute to the next, but moment-to-moment movement is glacial.
The artwork for this album is so apt. Dharma is harsh and cold, blinding like the sun, and like staring into infinity all at the same time.
Best:Â âIâm Coming to the Gardenâ, first section of âFrozen Guitarsâ
