Disc
GaijinCD4

What happens when a duo of experimenters, radical, genius, and revolutionary, makes an album with a noise terrorist (member of an equally terrorist industrial-experimental collective) and a mad Venezuelan noise artist known for his complex electronic-psychopathic lobotomies, placing it on a label that produces everything but conventional music? It leads to an album like "GaijinCD4" (Vinyl Communications, 1997), undoubtedly one of the most beautiful things ever to reach human ears.

Matmos, Kid606, and Jay Lesser form the team that crafts this Masterpiece, an album that highlights the sound of experimentation, which from an abstract concept now takes on a more physical dimension than ever, also showcasing a brilliant thesis where the four manipulators tackle the equally abstract—and often misunderstood—concept of Genius. A unique creation in the macroworld of music, rich as it is in classifications and predefined standards. Unique precisely because it is completely beyond them, not even remotely similar to anything that already exists. We will now attempt to delve briefly into this concept, limiting ourselves to three global examples, three poles that might go hand in hand but remain broadly three distinct poles: Music. Noise. Experimentation.

When we listen to Dream Theater, beyond genres and classifications, we can say we are listening to good music, perhaps at times somewhat self-indulgent, but performed as it should be, pleasant to listen to, and based on the most classic melodic standards. When we play Merzbow, we are drilling our ears with what we could identify as genuine noise, entirely revolving, at least formally, around pure noise (it doesn't matter if the emotional spectrum can sometimes be wider than the melodic opposite, it is important to focus solely on the purely aesthetic side). When we listen to an experimental work, we are indeed listening to an 'experimental' piece (therefore based on non-conventional elements, innovation, creativity, etc.), which is assumed to escape, more or less successfully, from predefined elements (in our case notes/noise) but which, in most cases, has a perhaps distant (but present) root (idm, industrial, glitch, rock, jazz and so on...).

When we listen to "GaijinCD4," we are simply listening to "GaijinCD4": the sound that reaches our ears cannot be identified, labeled, or perceived as something that has anything to do with what is commonly known as 'music' (whether it consists of notes and harmonies or noises and electronic sounds). What our brain registers when it plays is the realization that these four lunatics are indeed making music without making music, resorting to noise without making noise, generating more or less noise-like flows that root into musical counterflows in an alchemy aimed at pairing and then canceling them. It is abstraction at its best.

We know Matmos well; they have created some of the most experimental electronic tracks ever: monsters of the so-called DigitalSoundProcessing of clearly 'concrete' extraction (sampling from every imaginable 'concrete' source, from bones to teeth, from the breath of hospitalized patients to blood from arteries, from trapped mice to surgical instruments). The duo are masters of the most advanced digital technology and pioneers of that celebrated laptoptronica scene in San Francisco; at the same time, they have been able to rewrite post-rock towards a new and forward-looking form that highlights the importance of the 'Post,' moving away from the spiderland model and contaminating with third (and fourth, and fifth...) artistic/musical forms. All this while almost always sounding very original and, requisite no. 1 for earning the label of heavy experimenters, unclassifiable.

Kid606 is the natural partner when it comes to sounding original: this Venezuelan artist is known for an approach to electronics that makes technique, the sense of massacre and nonsense, unconventional breaks, and a constant quest to sound as delirious as possible his primary virtues. Almost as insane as His Majesty Otto Von Retarded (though far less genius), crazy and desecrating even in the titles, Kid606 does not reach the peaks of Matmos regarding the factor of radicality but touches others that insinuate more in technical, innovative, and formal discussions (just consider the pioneering use of environments like Audiomulch or Livecut in the breakcore/mashups realm, recently brought to the USA's masses by the now-famous Girl Talk).

Lesser needs no introduction: besides having collaborated on all Matmos albums and having conceived something utterly out of this world like the monumental "Gearhound," it's enough to emphasize that he is one of those figures revolving around the Big City Orchestra collective, an important reference point for the purest and most untamed underground experimentation, on tape.

So, it's a respected team that crafts this double masterpiece (if creating masterpieces is not for everyone, it's even less so when done through a double album). CD 2 is as brilliant as the dada-conceptual insights of the legendary RRRecords: it is a non-functional disc, intended to suggest the inclusion of multimedia content (with random labels like "html," "macromedia," "data cd") but absolutely unusable; pushing further within the range of musical experiments, amalgamating other more dada/expressionist artistic ones; the music/data/video container as we know it (vinyl, compact disc, cassette, DVD, videocassette, etc.) transcends its very nature as a 'gate' for any abstract content (multimedia in this case) to reclaim its primordial role as a common physical object. This concept is not dissimilar to what we will hear on CD1, where the non-barriers of audio-cerebral abstraction go hand in hand with real ones (concrete element, tangible) through primary sources in damaged, destroyed, mutilated, unrecognizable audio CDs (practically a Markus Popp on a kick), sounds and music seemingly without any logical thread outlining the pure expression of Sound as Sound and nothing else; escaping even from Schaffer's revolutionary theories for which music is not a collection of notes but of sounds, creating a new one, combining the two main theories, where sound is sound and nothing else (that is, what we perceive, note, or noise), and it doesn't matter if it comes from a third 'musical' source, equipped with notes or chords that fester until becoming pure sound, without any residue of notes or so-called 'melodic' elements.

Music, after all, is nothing but an illusion, an abstract concept, a striking of strings or keys, which only for the Western theories of who knows whom take names and forms of music. What we hear on "GaijiinCD4" is proselytism, characters knocking on the door of your mind with the intent to spread the religion of Sound; an invitation to experiment, to escape from all the equally delirious Written rules (harmonies, notes, scales, chords, etc.), as well as from the always tedious academic pose of historic experimental currents like concretism, minimalism, post-modernism, or other recent intellectual ones like microwave, lowercase, sound art, generative algorithm. Here, Sound is treated for what it really means. Nothing more... no sheet music, no strange symbols of keys and dots, no max/msp patches for wannabe scientists.

An invitation we can perceive from the destructive work done on one of the few recognizable original sources, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, likely by Kid606, who is no stranger to these rewrites, that becomes nothing but noise. But a beautiful noise to be passed down to posterity, from music history.. where Ian Curtis's indisputably fabulous voice transforms from Voice to Sound. A fantastic sound, while the 'notes' of guitar and the rhythms of drums, stripped of their melodicity, now appear clear for what they really are: sounds. Sounds produced by a physical device, the hit of drumsticks or the pluck of strings, which is the oldest known form of sound, percussing.

"GaijinCD4," beyond surpassing the never-too-reached non-limits that the sound/music duo offers, and being an authentic ode to Sound, is also THE glitch manifesto: the real glitch, in its bug/error essence; nothing melodic filled with bass drums and catchy riffs, no Jap-sine waves, but only real errors, generated by the rape through advanced techniques of the object commonly known as Compact Disc (or its waveforms).

An unutterable masterpiece.