Masonna
Spectrum Ripper

THE REVIEW

Maso Yamazaki (for friends, Masonna) is one who, like all the greatest artists of all time, does everything by himself. I believe it's called autarchy. His works are characterized by frantic rhythms, on the edge of extreme violence. Always very fast, always elusive and crushing.
Maso takes the microphone (which he has previously connected to a row of distortion pedals and other various quirks) and starts screaming like a Vietnamese soldier forced to jog in a minefield. This physical activity is performed under the fire of a hundred machine guns, jets of napalm lovingly dropped by biplanes flying overhead, and perhaps (just perhaps) a few dozen tanks bombing him cheerfully. On his side, his imaginary army has wisely equipped him with a pair of splintery wooden shoes lined internally with electrified barbed wire.

Spectrum Ripper is no exception in Masonna's excellent discography. This may not be his most extreme album, but that's just a matter of perspective. His work is always tough stuff. The kind of stuff you play to your girlfriend in her sleep when you've decided you never want to see her again. Maso doesn't betray his fans in essence. Or fans of the essence. In short, it's a great listen. Occasionally, you hear sobs, like imploring gasps. And they are all regularly, philologically broken, retouched, stiffened. And they get lost in the whirlpool. Or at most, they come back to be massacred a little more... only to be thrown back (again, finally) into the blender.
There's a bit of everything in there, and it's all scraped, fast, and beautiful. 25 tracks of dirty, ultra-perverse violent chaos.

Our hero is (hypothetically, but these are my sensations) once again at the center of a sort of hallucinatory war made of explosions, white noise, machine gun fire, things blowing up, and a lot of metal scraping against more metal. The feeling can be like watching a documentary on the Asian war filmed with a camera built specifically to scratch and ruin the film. An album for the whole family.