by Khagan Aslanov (@virgilcrude)
When Albertan composer and multi-instrumentalist Matt McKenzie first began forming the idea of starting a small experimental label, he could hardly predict how quickly it would become a bastion of outsider music in Western Canada, or that just a few short years later, he would be pressing a record by Merzbow (Masami Akita), the revered Japanese free improvisation noise artist, who, for the past five decades, has remained at the epicentre of the counterculture of noise.
The catalogue of Honey Farm, now six records deep, has already spanned so much of all the multi-faceted, metamorphosed, and mangled genres that have come to fall under the ever-expanding umbrella of “experimental” music. Drone, breakcore, sine wave manipulation, noise concrète, sound collage, and electronic and acoustical improvisation have all found a home in Honey Farm’s dissonant halls, with Canadian artists, both seasoned and young filling out its burgeoning roster. Now, with Any Other Utterance, McKenzie has reached abroad.
Each side of Any Other Utterance, a collaboration between Merzbow and Chicago-born, Japan-based percussionist Akio Jeimus, presents a different face of improvised music – the “contained,” hermetic chaos of the studio, and the new feral life such pieces take in live settings.
The A-side studio take “Florescent Silhouettes” drops you in media res into a thick textural knot of dissonance. Akita and Jeimus slide in and out of tightly locked interplay, the harsh wall of electronics, by turns acting as an overwhelming compressed squall or a shuddering backdrop. Jeimus’ snare and cymbal-heavy drumming leaps and lurches on high frequencies, bright and cutting, full of ghost notes and coiling rolls. Towards its closing third, the electronics coalesce into an unremitting mutinous pulse, dense and unforgiving.
The two-act “Fusia’s Joule,” recorded live at POLARIStokyo in the spring of ’25, offers little in terms of repose or ambience. Akita and Jeimus, freed from the constraints of controlled studio spaces, giddily thrust their sound up to the rafters. The piece intermittently crashes out of an oscillating pattern into a freewheeling implosion, with the percussion collapsing into ostinato blast beats so swarming, it would put Mueller to shame. Recorded by veteran live engineer Ki Moon Song and mastered by the superb Congolese avant-garde composer Cedrik Fermont, “Fusia’s Joule“ is a two-punch wildworld of artful clamour.
By the time Any Other Utterance fades into viscous static, you are left with a dizzying, ear-wax-stripping ringing in your ears, which has long since acted as Merzbow’s calling card. The legendary artist has always been unafraid to delve into music’s harshest, most desolate corners, knowing that to the discerning ear with a masochistic streak, what this havoc so often creates is a profound meditative state.