GX Jupitter-Larsen & Pain Jerk ‘Reference Desk’ C-20 (Noiseopoly) & Pain Jerk & Zbigniew Karkowski ‘Live-Enemy’ CDR (Culture)

 

When I first heard about ‘Reference Desk’ I was sitting in an LA café for a late breakfast and a catchup. By the time the cassette landed at my post office box, the Covid-19 pandemic had heaved, isolated, and wreaked untold havoc, and expectation had been festering throughout. In what I believe is the first time the two have shared a release, ‘Reference Desk’ was released as part of GX Jupitter-Larsen’s fundraiser for his forthcoming movie of the same title. What it says about the movie I won’t even speculate – let’s make do with the cassette for now.

One Side has Kohei Gomi manipulating raw sound from pump sounds authored by GX, the heavy lungfuls of the pump in constant cycle as Kohei’s sub-bass infiltration and chirping interference stays mostly at the fringes, occasional glimmers of colour increasing somewhat over the course of the piece to become a staged set of fireworks by the end. The inflections are a little disconnected from the raw mechanised breathing of GX’s source material, almost invisible to begin with an even at their peak struggling to make an impression.

Other Side finds a bubbling repetition met with raw metallic scraping, backwards treatments and acoustic detritus by GX, a more considered interaction where the search for source material – books sounds by Pain Jerk, processed and re-recorded by GX – much more difficult, the blistering undercurrent submerged with heavy, resonant, toolshed textures.

For two title belt holders able to still inflame an ordinary situation into noise oblivion, ‘Reference Desk’ is a restrained study, befitting the library reference – but probably still making enough of a ruckus to be asked to leave the reading room. Those after a truly disruptive ruckus won’t find it, but the B side especially brings the two together in an entirely satisfactory way nonetheless.

Pain Jerk has emerged from something of a self-imposed scene exile, a stream of Bandcamp releases and the ‘Mission Invisible’ CD on Hospital giving plenty to chew on after forcing the audience to starve for some time. ‘Live-Enemy’ is one of several online releases to now find their way onto CDR, finding Pain Jerk working extensively – and successfully – with Polish experimentalist Zbigniew Karkowski, who lived and worked in Tokyo during the final years before his sad passing in 2013.

The CDR is led by a pair of live collaborations, an excerpt from a 21 October 2008 set in Poland opening with a surge of crumpled 0s and 1s which are torched by noise electronics until the entire concoction ignites, the immolated remains left to smoulder in the grieving hum of charred equipment. The track is excerpted from a longer set and feels truncated perhaps as a result, making its point quickly and without any of the force or development of the longer track which follows.

The second track is more considered, a 2012 Tokyo performance with extended agony perpetrated by both: an initial haunt of burgeoning high end fed chunks of gurgling digitalia, voice snippets and data error until the piece ruptures into canonical harsh noise from Kohei Gomi. Once that beast is off the leash there’s no getting it back on, the two seeming to take it in turns to push a dominant voice while the other adds an undercurrent of stability. Zbigniew’s garish digital brushstrokes run dry well before Kohei Gomi’s harrowing saturations. Pain Jerk is in unstoppable form during this collaboration once the restraints are off, a dense and heavy presence force which suffocates Zbigniew’s material in the ultimate, and forces it to suffer well before that.

Kohei supplements the material with a solo track, “Dedcated to ZK”, the first half teasing slow tone undulations, rubberised shapes of highly constricted synth burble and a sputtering bass presence, all masticated by Gomi’s laptop and eventually subjugated to sprays of near-white noise which only briefly open into more detailed layers: a fairly brief excursion into the fulsomely bricked noise which the collaborative tracks have already delivered in abundance. Things return fairly perfunctorily to an extension of the squelching repetitions from before, as if nothing really happened in the meantime, before ending upon the same orchestral tiptoeing which began the piece.

There’s an overt digital sterility to “Dedicated to ZK” which the other pieces on the CDR don’t rely upon, and which shapes particularly the noise component in an unfortunate way; even when the harsh components are set to ultra-stun they lack the depth and grain of the dual live attack, their brevity and the piece’s digital flatness turning the tribute more into a longing. The point to ‘Live-Enemy’ is really made by the collaborative tracks, the solo supplement a recognition which somewhat misses the object of its recollection.

https://painjerkwrackedandruined.bandcamp.com/album/live-enemy

Xome & Death Squad ‘Life: Quit It/Automaton’ C-64 (Neural Operations)

This is one of four split cassettes which were originally shared by Death Squad in 1996, and were reissued by Michael Nine in 2020 alongside his early Off World Kick Death Square project. This cassette’s brief re-emergence adds a few more pieces of knowledge to the formation of both Xome and Death Squad, and had been a curiosity of mine for a while given the seemingly difficult compatibility of the two projects.

Xome’s early work is distant from the exuberant effects ping pong Bob Scott would come to master and particularly across ‘Life: Quit It’. These early experimentations utilise flows of dark distortion as their primary noise construct, “Xome Supreme Truth Cult” and “トラック野郎” only buoyed by extraneous inputs of what are predominantly voice – looped yelling and various chatter – after an intentionally slow and dreary start. The final two tracks, dominated by “Melt”, are a grab-bag of audio oddities with even less of the noise Xome would come to be known for, moments of distortion peaking to give some asphalt blur to what is otherwise a montage of slowed speech, found city sound, and God-knows what, inflating into a rumble of low-end which vibrates under flickering loops, messy media manipulation and what I think may be the cries of abused children’s toys.

While like most Xome material I suspect the end results are live-to tape mandates, there is preparation to the sampled, found, and pre-arranged sound which ensures plenty of change across the half hour notwithstanding the quite straight forward course of the generated distortion which is embraced. The exuberance of later releases manifests here as a delight in the various pre-arranged inputs, which even if somewhat crude add streaks of colour to the otherwise monochrome noise.

Death Squad’s ‘Automaton’ lacks the terrorising presence which the project later developed, but is a more fully-formed realisation of the project in comparison to the site of Xome’s branch on the evolutionary tree. While only given a single title the side is broken into seven or so shorter segments, at its best in painting grainy noise textures using rumbling analogue low-end, shortwave radio hum, dying consumer electronics and lungfuls of smoggy distortion.

There’s a choking haze to this material which would only become thicker and more hurtful as Death Squad finessed its sound, but on ‘Automaton’ it’s a viscous cloud, hanging in the air densely and being unavoidably inhaled. Clumps of obscured hazards cling to its particles, as drips of gargled high end are expectorated, dying equipment throbs smoke, and loops pump the sickly air back upon itself. The concentration of sooted noise glimpses only minimal movement in the worse afflicted pieces, ‘Automaton’’s segments tending to work small movements only to have those covered in yet more grime, although the loop-based portions tent to develop a circular breathing which develops slightly more clarity – and the end of the tape weighs the  atmospheric churn down to the ground, finally hitting the dirt with a more resolute low-end tremor.

While both projects were in 1996 still shedding their formative experience, Death Squad already sounds like it should be with violence and distrust growing over time behind the poisonous clouds of ‘Automaton’ and other mid-1990s works. Xome would ultimately find a joy in harsh noise which is only hinted at in ‘Life: Quit It’ – and only realised in the sound inputs, not the noise itself. Whether adjacent to later familiarity or not, this cassette is an insight into both acts: a chance to understand each a little better, both delivering competent material without either yet at the point which would be their ultimate contribution.