Anyone who's read more than a handful of my reviews will know that I'm a champion of the weird, the whacky, the experimental and the avant-garde. I like out there. I like challenging. I like sonic torture. I guess I'm wired differently from the majority of people, or something. Whatever, I have more than simply a high tolerance of music that's so far beyond the mainstream that your average Radio 1 listener would question whether or not it actually qualifies as music.
Ninun, however, really do test my capacity for experimentalism. This set contains five tracks - Parts 1 to 5 - which average five or six minutes apiece. The title gives an indication of what they're about, but even improv and freeform really needs some kind of sense of coherence - a group of musicians playing intuitively, together... that's not what I get from this.
It's not that it's noisy. For the most part, it's not all that noisy, but the time signatures simply don't gel. I don't mean that they're math-rock complex, switching and weaving and doing all sorts of mind-blowing things, I mean that all the musicians sound like they're playing different pieces in different rooms, all with reverb units set to different delays that impinge on one another to disorientating effect. It sounds like a bunch of tone-deaf chimps trying to tune up without the aid of a tuning device: painful. To be blunt, it's bloody rotten, and if it was a gig I'd walk out (but not after demanding a refund). Thankfully, I can just press stop (and I did persevere, but by part 3 I was wishing myself deaf).
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