Karera Musication – Koroshiya Ichi [2001; Cinema Monsoon]

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The score to Takashi Miike’s film 殺し屋1 (Ichi the Killer)

is essentially a side-project from the Japanese group Boredoms, as all four members of Karera Musication (for whom this was the only release) had put time into that band as well.  The score freely plays around with noise and sonic treatments (to the point of including a series of hearing test tones in the opening track, “1″), meshed with post-rock and world music in a blurry flood of riffs and melodic extrapolations.  Fine-cut audio splicing comes and goes, weird vocal squeaks push into jazzy horn licks, muddy squelches drift into mad drumming into electric-sizzle guitar, traditional Chinese instrumentation is merged with dub, and so on.  As free-roaming as the music is, it somehow ties all together quite well, and the quiet menace that looms up occasionally plays at nice odds with the psychopathy on display in the film.

Corroded Master – Bodycount [2012; self-released]

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Packing four mixes of the title track, plus two for “Light”, this single leads with the base mix of “Bodycount”, a standard 4/4 electro-industrial stomper, with bit-crushed synths and compressed, hissing vocals livening up the hi-hat and bass kick staples.  Aside from dragging things out to five minutes and change, it’s not too bad, but that’s about twice as long as it needs to effectively communicate its ideas.  “Bodycount (Traumatize remix)” follows, playing up the synths and down-mixing the percussion to put a more dance-friendly twist on the steady pulses; “Bodycount (Count Gets Higher mix by Tactical Module)” brings a harder kick and shriller key squeals into play while shuffling up the rhythms; and “Bodycount V2″ stirs up more fluttery synth touches while bringing the vocals to higher clarity.

On the “Light” side, the original mix of that song moves to a slower pace, rolling along on slow kick-claps and protracted metallic scrapes, while the vocals indistinctly burble and echo, and  “Light (Core Red Core remix)” swings the synth sweeps a bit wider, but otherwise stays pretty much the same.  Decent material, but nothing outstanding.