Acid Mothers Temple, Psychedelic, Japanese, Japanoise, Noise, Experimental; CD - Ex Used condition This newest solo outing from Kawabata Makoto is very different from most Acid Mothers Temple records, however. Eschewing guitars almost completely, this album features three long pieces of subtly shifting electronic drones and vocal loops. "I'm In Your Inner Most" is a psychedelic drone journey to the center of your mind. Makoto pushes the distortion on his electric organ, and fills out the texture with synthesizers, violins and a female vocal sample that randomly fades in and out of the mix. Not very easily digestible at first, upon repeated listenings you begin to sense the true cosmic transendence of his music. LaMonte Young's influence can be heard in the first track - a long, shape-shifting high-pitched squeal that cleanses the listener's mind of all thought, leaving only the rapturous sensation of sound. The second track begins with the same drone, but adds delightfully cosmic keyboard arpeggios and cyclical melodies. Even throughout the beautiful melodic sections, Makoto continues to push the noise and percussive distortion so that the listener remains in a completely trancelike state while investigating the astral worlds that the keyboards usher you through. Shades of Tangerine Dream and Terry Riley become apparent towards the end of this track, as the synthesizer loops take prominence. The third track "Oculation (remix version)" contains the same organ tones and repetitive synthesizers as the first two tracks, but adds some atonal guitar feedback into the mix. "I'm In Your Inner Most" is definitely an album that requires active listening to enjoy......

Japanese, Japanoise, Grind, Psych, Experimental, Noise; CD - Ex Used condition Melt-Banana have absolutely no time for attention spans and neither do I. Their music is at once an entity unto itself and bizarrely essential to music as a whole, likely because there has always been an unspoken demand for hysterically overenergetic ultra-distorted music in the backs of minds of various hyperactive earth-dwelling consumers of music, none of whom have been completely satisfied by the earnestness and overbearing sincerity that runs through the majority of heavy music. Very few bands have it in their craft to be heavy and fun in mutual excess, yet Melt-Banana have made a prolific career out of it and are quite comfortably in their third decade as I type. They’ve always been an abundantly heavy band without any of the scornful misanthropy, politicised sharpness and/or meatheaded obnoxiousness that tends to come with the package. That said, Charlie is without a shadow of a doubt their most aggressive album. After the more scatterbrained, underproduced antics of their previous outings, the girls and boys of MxBx seemed to feel it was time to raise their game on this one; the production is arguably the finest of their whole career, the songs are developed into disarmingly coherent structures, the noise is kept up at absolute fucking maximum from start to finish, and (unusually) many of the songs are laden with an off-hand sense of brutality that adds a different flavour to their trademark goofiness.

Evan Parker, Improv, Jazz, New Zealand, Leo Records, Richard Nunns is a New Zealander of European descent who studies and plays traditional Maori musical instruments. His pairing with Evan Parker (in a performance recorded at the 1999 International Jazz Festival in Wellington), while not necessarily an obvious match, works largely because of the saxophonist’s extraordinary flexibility. Many of the Maori instruments are percussive and produce little sustain. They’re made of natural materials like gourds, wood, or shells; they don’t reverberate in the way a modern designed and manufactured instrument like Parker’s saxophone does. Consequently, the music here tends to be sparse and quiet. Parker plays in a near subtone much of the time, and occasionally sounds as if he’s playing at some distance from the microphone. A person unacquainted with the subtleties of the Maori instruments is, of course, unable to evaluate Nunns’ skills from a cultural standpoint. But the music he produces is indeed moving. The gestures are small but concentrated. The instruments’ nature doesn’t give Nunns the flexibility to follow and respond to Parker’s every move, so he instigates, as Parker responds and embellishes. It’s much to the latter’s credit that he’s able to adapt to Nunns’ aesthetic so completely. It’s equally admirable for Nunns to have successfully absorbed the Maori manner of making music. It says something about the timeless nature of improvised music that modern jazz’s most advanced saxophonist can improvise convincingly with a musician who plays instruments so ancient in conception. Undoubtedly the most affecting element of this music is its innate humanness; on one particular track, for example, the breaths pulsing through Parker’s sax and Nunns’ Pukaea rakau kauri (a wooden trumpet) sound as if they might be coming from the same set of lungs, so well-attuned the men are to one another and the exigencies of improvised performance. A unconventionally beautiful meeting of souls. ~ Chris Kelsey