Meat Beat Manifesto & Merzbow
Extinct
UK COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR330CD (2024)
Now for some outright aggressive noise horror, one of the genres this label embraces with the appetite of a ravenous wolf. When faced with a new release from this most prolific of JapNoise maestros, I often check on their discography and count up the new releases; for year 2024, when this was completed and released, there were over 30 new solo albums logged on Discogs alone (although some might be reissues from his gargantuan catalogue).
The unique aspect of Extinct is that it feeds Merzbow’s harsh noise through a filter of intense mechanical beats, or vice versa – either way you look at it, the success has been to bring together two strong forces, behaving like biological entities spliced together and bred in the laboratory in some unholy experiment. Meat Beat Manifesto I never heard before and are well out of my line; started in Swindon in the late 1980s, mostly the work of John Stephen Corrigan who calls himself Jack Dangers and the creator who features here, although there were other members and camp followers within the Meat Beat enclave through the years. Their contribution to the culture has evidently been to provide wild and violent beats spliced with industrial noise, and as such this band are reckoned by many as an important influence on The Prodigy and Aphex Twin, and more generally are cited as reference points in the trip-hop and drum & bass genres.
All I can hear here, especially on the opening cut ‘Flakka’ is remorseless violence, compressing the listener into a tiny space with short, repeated loops of ugly sound. Merzbow may be trying to lighten the mood with his crazy swirls and squeals, but this particular death-ride is still insufferably claustrophobic and grim. If it’s intended to energise the listener into action, for me it has the exact opposite effect, inducing instant desperation. Second cut ‘Burner’ is marginally more easy to process, simply because the rhythm is less predictable and slightly syncopated – though I hesitate to apply a jazz drumming term in the context of this unsubtle, brutalising music. While the hype sticker promises ‘intricate break beats and samples’, which are probably present in the work but very hard to discern in among the intensive car-crash of sounds, other reviewers see fit to praise the destructive journey on which this juggernaut is set, mowing down all life in its path. “Extinct” is right, if that’s the intended outcome.
Beautiful hard-edged geometric shapes on the cover art, although they do have a certain precision I can’t find in the music. (12/04/2024)