New Music November: Merzbow - Pulse Demon

Merzbow is a love-hate thing for me, back when I was but a wee lad and just starting to get into extremely abrasive music, Merzbow was something of a fable I'd heard many a music geek tell. "This crazy Japanese guy records these horrible piles of noise and then does limited print runs with all this bizarre pro-animal shit printed in the liner notes and on the covers, you need to check this out" was something I'd heard many a time, but I could never really get around to actually listening to it. Back then I didn't have good internet nor the magic of iTunes or even an MP3 player so I had to buy CDs and Merzbow was both unbelievably expensive and hard to find.

Flash forward a good five years and now we're here, drowning ourselves in this ear rape. On top of New Music November, I grabbed Pulse Demon as part of a little dare with friends called the Merzplunge. We'd all grab three Merzbow albums, give full listens without trying to ignore or turn down the music and then share our thoughts once we finished. It was a pretty daunting task to select the discs, but then we ended up all just getting the same three (1930, Venereology, and Pulse Demon).

I was originally going to review 1930 for this piece (my little blurb, just for fun: unexpected beauty), but after going over all three discs I ended up finding this to be the most interesting (Venereology was boring, frankly, incredibly loud but without a shred of interesting texture or anything resembling musicianship on even the most base level). Pulse Demon is very much a Merzbow record (which is to say long, loud and decidedly unpleasant), but it has a certain je ne sais quois. With the benefit of proper stereo versions over the terrible Youtube videos I'd heard in the past, I can finally appreciate the subtleties of the nonmusical parts. The bass has a very steady throb, not quite a beat but more than just a dull thud, relaxing in a strange way. There's the usual squeals and slams you expect from Masami Akita's oeuvre, but a lot more restrained this time around.

There's not really much difference between each of the tracks, but with an artist like Merzbow the concept of a song really isn't applicable in any way. To truly enjoy something like this, you have to clear your mind and listen to the whole disc. It's not something that'll convert you to Akita's little ear-raping, PETA-loving camp (frankly, I'm not even there, the man annoys the balls off of me and for the most part the rest of the Merzcatalogue seems like meandering bullshit), but if you have an appreciation for the more abstract side of noise music, this disc is a must-listen.