Japanese Torture Comedy Hour - Dolphin Meat

Japanese Torture Comedy Hour was a noise project that revolved around Scott Hull, J Randall and other related musicians, and eventually became a solo project for Randall in it's own right. Dolphin Meat is an hour-long improvised live performance (entitled "日本の拷問コメディアワー - EP#62") created entirely out of feedback loops and recorded to VHS tape (because, fuck it, why not?). I tried doing something similar about five or six years ago; bleeding feedback from mic to speaker in an infinite loop in an attempt to create effortless, endless manipulatable distortion, but I failed catastrophically, so there's a little bit of respect here to Randall for getting all of this out of a simple feedback loop (I just suck at noise, really).

All things considered however, I guess this falls more under the power electronics umbrella and isn't at all that harsh - for a bunch of batshit crazy improvised feedback loops it's actually quite listenable. You can stream the entire thing at Randall's label page Grindcore Karaoke, or even download it if noise is yer thing, like.

Scott Hull - Audiofilm II

It took me a while but I finally got around to buying the second instalment in the Audiofilm series. I don't really know what has taken so long, considering it's not particularly rare, difficult to obtain or even worth a lot. I got this off Discogs for £1.50, which for even a 3" CD is criminal. The packaging and artwork is more of the same type of stuff that was introduced on the first Audiofilm disc (clicky) so I'll just get on with a quick overview of the music on offer here, as I've gone off waffling too much in recent posts!

Audiofilm II is much harsher that it's predecessor. It opens with some heavy atmospherics, which doesn't stay in the same state for long; it is only a matter of minutes before things have shifted into drone territory, and a blink of an eye until all outputs build and build until the pummelling atmosphere becomes dangerously close to harsh noise. The track continues in this vein, coming to and fro, but for the most part remaining particularly full-on for something that is meant to be an atmospheric piece. I know noise conjures it's own atmosphere, but it is not what I was expecting here. Scott Hull is the master of heavy, we all know this, but with Requiem and Audiofilm I, he did not set us up for a harsh noise attack. Here's hoping to one day seeing the guy return to Japanese Torture Comedy Hour with Jay Randall.

This little 3" CD was released by the distro/label Crucial Blast, and is limited to 1000 copies. Check out the entire thing in the link below. Make sure you're speakers are turned up loud and you're streaming in the highest possible quality.

Japanese Torture Comedy Hour - Voltage Monster

This was my first ever noise CD. I accidentally bought it before I'd even heard of the noise genre, let alone of Merzbow or any of his button-pushing, knob-twisting, pedal-stomping ilk. I bought this CD once upon a long time ago off the Relapse mail order, purely because Jay Randall was involved. Boy did I have a shock when I played the fucker! At 17 years old I was at no stage in my musical development to even fathom the existence of - let alone appreciate - something as downright artsy-fartsy and nihilistic as harsh noise.

If some beret-wearing hipster had told me: "You gotta look passed it, maaaaaaan, to find the textures with the chaos, maaaaaaaaaaan, for each and every one of us interprets noise in a special cerebral way, maaaaaaan!" I would have set fire to his silly little beard and pushed the fucker down a flight of stairs. After insisting he shut the fuck up and listen to some goregrind, of course. However, as the existence of noise and power electronics as genres became apparent to me with time, I eventually remembered this prickly little CD gathering dust in my collection that I bought so many moons ago.

It suddenly all made so much sense! You're right, potentially imagined hipster with a silly beard! I can see (or is it hear?) the beauty within the chaos. I can interpret patterns and textures beneath the sea of mindfucking white noise like the best of 'em! Voltage Monster might not be as challenging or downright fucking insane as JTCH's 24-hour song "Lost in Distortion", but it is still as vicious, pairing the most head-frying harsh noise with the creepiest offerings of dark ambient.  I'll soon be running out of fancy adjectives so it's probably better if I just shut up now and let you listen to the track below and be done with it. Open your ears, and your mind, maaaaaaaaan!