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Review: 'Sun Ra / Merzbow'
'Strange City'   

-  Album: 'Strange City' -  Label: 'Cold Spring Records'
-  Genre: 'Industrial' -  Release Date: '29th September 2016'

Our Rating:
So, what we have here is an album ‘officially licensed from Irwin Chusid of the Sun Ra estate’, after Cold Spring’s Justin Mitchell ‘negotiated rare and unreleased tracks from the Sun Ra archive to be remixed and treated by Masami Akita’.

As the press release goes on to explain, ‘The tracks incorporate the jazz power of Sun Ra, carried into brutal excess by the legendary Japanese artist, Merzbow.’ And brutal is indeed the word. These are hardly what one might call loving or delicate treatments: this is little short of total annihilation of the kind only Merzbow can execute.

The vinyl and CD editions may have completely different track-listings, with the CD containing two tracks (‘Livid Sun Loop’ (32:11) and ‘Granular Jazz Part 2’ (34:03)) and the album featuring three (‘Granular Jazz’ parts 1, 3 and 4), but whichever version you hear, it sounds pretty much as you’d expect. A mangled wall of utterly devastating noise which tears through random freeform horn parps, it’s not necessarily Akita’s most abrasive work but it’s certainly challenging, by any standards, including the immense and exhausting Merzbow catalogue. Not so much Sun Ra as Sunn O))) Raaaaaahhh! it’s a horrific, ear-bleeding atonal, droning, shrieking headfuck. It’s probably more likely to appeal to fans of Merzbow than Sun Ra. One for the completists and the deranged masochists.


  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Sun Ra / Merzbow - Strange City