In the seven tracks of this album, Ken Ikeda presents studies of sound accretion and interaction, with one-word titles (such as “静寂 Seijaku | Stillness“ or “白昼 Hakuchu | Daylight”) which suggest the impulse behind each of the highly-abstract pieces. Audible surface tensions, incidental string picking, scraping, clattering, clinking, and clicks or pops from the audio capturing are the primary points of activity, occurring without steady momentum, tempo, or intensity. Despite that, the atmosphere is often relaxed, feeling unhurried and natural, but it does lead to the pieces falling out of memory rather quickly. Something more suited to background texturing than direct focus, but still rather striking in its presentation.
With their debut EP, the Pennsylvania group of Grass turn out an uncommon blend of stoner rock and death metal, steering clear of the usual sludge cross-over points in favor of trading off between crunchy and noodly guitar riffs while bellowing the lyrics. The drums and bass get minor spotlighting in comparison, and while there’s some interesting detours in the five songs, their main drives end up feeling fairly uninspired, and definitely mismatched to the tone of the cover art. A curious experiment, but not worth hunting down.
In this one-off side-project from Saskrotch, chiptune breakbeat is joined with drone and chilly atmospherics, filling out the mood set by track titles like “Fuel Has Been Depleted, Sending Distress Signal”, “I’ve Begun Talking To Myself”, and “Life Support System Failing“. While the instrumentation isn’t too far from the usual for chipbreak, it’s handled with a reserved and patient approach uncommon in the style. A couple of the songs (“I Think About You Every Day I’m Up Here”
and “My Last Breath As I Drift Through Space”) do go back to the more active percussion drive, though the low synth swings of the former and edge-pushed treble of the latter each manage to tune in a bit of the downcast flavor despite their energy. A neat and quick curio, even if it was produced as something of a joke.
The first disc of a double album pairing two separate concept albums, JAPSHITFUN Is Dead consists of 100 tracks, almost all of them one to two seconds long. Following the 43-second opening track, “this is the only song that scrobbles so you can stop listening after this", he also stops bothering to edit out the export track numbers from the titles, as immediately noted with “2 fuck editing out the numbers for 1 second songs“. In the absence of content for the songs beyond staticky squealing, a couple of samples, and about 30 seconds of grind, the titles provide the main portion of character, much of it spent deriding various items while being over-the-top in offensiveness.
Tracks four through eight are spent calling things gay, nine through twenty lol’ing at things (e.g., “10 lol at self proclaimed nihilists who have myspace”), and then a slew of mockery for various bands and pieces of ‘00s internet culture (”24 last.fm is full of gays (like me)”, “33 every noise artist tries too hard”) before dropping into keyboard mashing (“50
qweqweqwe adf a”, “53 i’m bored already =I”). Further castigation of others and himself fills the rest, with some being very much of the time (”73 yahoo chat is full of pedos”) and others less so (”86 anal cunt are a bunch of rockstar faggots plus its false grind”), wrapping up with “96 internet noise”, “97 is”, “98 extremely”, “99 fucking”, and “100 gay.”
JAPSHITFUN Presents… Timeless Classics, the second disc, goes simpler with its titling silliness, beginning with “love-ah yu” and adding an extra ‘u’ to the end for each of the ten following tracks. Layering J-pop, sometimes sped up or over-amped, with percussion so thick and fast that it verges on static, the songs from this section hover around the two-minute mark, though the point is essentially made with the first instance.
Together, the two discs are effective as an outlet of disdainful attitude, and pretty well corner the market on mockery of their more extremely niche targets, but the pairing is still more of a curio than an object of actual listening appreciation.
In the opening track of this single, Geiger builds up from a simple beat into increasingly active loop layers, with slow-surf tone-fades providing the most distinctive touches to the otherwise fairly stock techno, though the fairly slow pace also helps give it character. Things fade to a quiet close, and “Bum Bum” picks up with another basic beat, though snapping flourishes on the end pick it up somewhat. The other notable features are some gasps and bent tones, the latter of which gain volume and prominence of the course of the song before again fading down into the exit. Some nice moments, but nothing too special.
Scrambled Brains 