Merzbow
Tauromachine

Masami Akita kicks ass. It's around 1979, and Masami is sick of all the music made up to that point. So what does he do? He gets up, overturns the chair, and starts stomping his feet and making noise. Obviously, it's a metaphor, but that noise will give birth to Noise and then Harsh-Noise. Or was it already Harsh-Noise? What the hell do I know. The fact is Merzbow does it first. And he is (fucking) the best. The most methodical. The most hallucinatory. The most evocative. The most Japanese. The most sex-phobic. The most conceptual. The most self-referential (stuff that makes Ghezzi look like a damn university professor by comparison). The most everything. A bone spins in the air, and we follow it until it turns into a spaceship. Ellipsis. Those idiots who think noise is a label to stick on bands like Sonic Youth and Fugazi make me laugh (on that note, I've heard things you humans wouldn't believe). In America, they arrived late. And they did it in a different way. Or they didn’t do it. Or they did it differently. This is what differentiates everything related to artistic artifacts in a general sense. Doing something one way, and doing it another way.

It's the same in cinema; in Italy, we know it well: a group of piglets full of mayonnaise turned Italian cinema into a “bigger” television, and gave it the final blow by turning it into a landfill of terribly idiotic anecdotes. Damn stupid anecdotes... as if a film was made with the damn anecdotes of four (damn) directors and four (damn) shitty journalists. But to save money and seats and to boast power, they do even worse. Question: who the hell would have the balls to invest some money in something decent or even just in ideas? Answers? None? There are no answers because there are no objects capable of being invested in or consecrated to the subjects of those answers. That's why 'fuck off. Fuck everyone, damn it. Merzbow is someone who literally fucks the entire music world. And at the same time inspires it. Because he knows it. Because he knows (and does) his own thing. Because he doesn't care. Forget “the punks” (I laugh). Cough cough... (I cough). Tauromachine. It's 1998, and this magnificent album... No, I'm not Paolo Limiti. Paolo Limiti would drop dead after the first three seconds of listening to this MAGNIFICENT album. (im)Moral: musical genres like noise-rock and indie-rock have turned the world into a kind of mediocre film club crowded with damn radical-chic “experts” who started spewing judgments on everything and everyone. Don't trust these people; they know nothing. If someone tells you about their experience as a mic stand holder or a concert-goer at a Shellac world star concert, don't think badly of Shellac. Please, this is crucial.