There are two piece’s styles that I would like to borrow for a while, crack open the case of and poke around and see what makes them tick. And drone, and grate, and come inches from making a coherent feeling and keep you just on the edge of anticipating how incredible your ears and hear and mind would feel when if they just stepped slightly over the line that you’re really not sure you can know it’s nature or it’s position. Then I want to cut some wires and short bits out and add in more switches and dials and re-do some of the wiring in a horribly messy tangled way and put it back together, start it up with jumper cables and see what I can do with it.
The two pieces I’m thinking of are part two of Merzbow’s Sphere and the first track from Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid’s The Exchange Session Volume 2, Hold Down The Rythmns, Hold Down The Machines. I’m also thinking a little of the tracks and discography surrounding each of these, as well as what I know of the artists’ other projects and all sorts of unrelated stuff that permeates through all the wall of important/unimportant bits and colours what I’m actually thinking of.
Hold Down The Rythmns, Hold Down The Machines is essentially, as I hear it: Steve Reid playing a sort of canvas of varying textures and Kieran Hebden painting on it with a collection on electronics and laptop sounds to make a focus and a feeling through the track. Almost a feeling, it’s more like he’s painting a feeling in colour and detail and line but holding back the shape of the thing so you’re never really what you’re looking at. He’s teasing you. He crosses the line in his back catalogue though with some of his work as Four Tet (see the album ‘Rounds’).
Sphere goes the other way. It’s canvas is a short, slow, repeating bassline full of darkness and brooding. The paint is the insistant, grating, rythmnless static that is what you come to expect from Merzbow. Find some evil radio and tune it just off a station that uses a crappy broken transmitter, listen to it in the dodgiest car you can find with duct-taped wiring in the radio and a coathangar for an arial. Listen to it in the middle of one of those cloverleaf freeway intersections that runs between the industrial area and that dodgy part of town. Not quite what it sounds like, but that’s the sound I’d aim for.
I was gonna upload some mp3s of these tracks so ya'll could have a clue what I'm on about, but they're both over fifteen minutes long.