Merzbow / Mats Gustafsson / Balázs Pándi, Thurston Moore - 2015 - Cuts Of Guilt, Cuts Deeper 2xCD

RareNoise Records ‎– 052

Before the church acoustics and live group-mind of Cuts Up, Cuts Out, this quartet first assembled inside a London studio attached to an indoor skateboard park and produced more than eighty minutes of sound that feels capable of stripping paint from the ramps. Cuts of Guilt, Cuts Deeper expands the Merzbow, Mats Gustafsson and Balázs Pándi trio by adding Thurston Moore, but the guitar does not simply make an already loud group louder. It introduces another unstable surface between Gustafsson’s reeds and Merzbow’s electronics, creating a dense middle territory where breath, feedback, strings and circuitry repeatedly become impossible to separate. The four musicians do not behave like soloists taking turns at the front. They enter as one large organism whose organs happen to be made from different technologies.

“Replaced by Shame – Only Two Left” establishes Pándi as the album’s moving skeleton. His drumming is ferocious, but its real importance lies in how quickly he can change the meaning of everything surrounding it. A barrage becomes propulsion when he finds a pulse beneath it, then becomes free-falling mass when that pulse breaks apart. Gustafsson’s reeds arrive in enormous respiratory blasts, forcing the evidence of a human body through the electronic pressure, while Moore works inside the noise rather than laying recognizable rock guitar across its surface. Merzbow occupies every remaining crack, sometimes producing a continuous wall and sometimes opening sudden cavities in which the others appear with startling clarity. “Divided by Steel. Falling Gracefully.” discovers the elegance hidden inside this method. The title sounds contradictory until the music demonstrates that impact and suspension can occur simultaneously.

The second disc does not merely repeat the first at higher volume. “Too Late, Too Sharp – It Is Over” exposes more internal space, allowing individual gestures to cast longer shadows before the quartet closes around them again. Moore’s guitar becomes especially useful here because it can function as attack, drone, scrape or barely identifiable electrical residue. Gustafsson moves between acoustic force and live electronics, confusing the boundary between air pushed through metal and signal pushed through amplification. Pándi listens for structures that have not fully formed yet, answering them before they become obvious, while Merzbow continually changes the apparent size of the room. The music can feel microscopic one moment, every texture pressed against the ear, then abruptly expand into an aircraft hangar filled with weather.

“All His Teeth in Hand, Asking Her Once More” provides no conventional resolution, but its long final movement clarifies what the quartet has been constructing. This is not noise as four people refusing limitation independently. It is noise as unusually concentrated listening. A sound is introduced, challenged, buried, revived and transformed by someone else until ownership disappears. Mats Gustafsson described the session as having no game plan, while Balázs Pándi reduced the working method to deep listening and improvisation. That absence of preparation did not produce randomness because each musician arrived with decades of instinct and the willingness to let those instincts be altered by the room. Cuts of Guilt, Cuts Deeper is exhausting in the productive sense: it temporarily overwhelms the listener’s usual hierarchy of foreground and background, instrument and environment, composition and accident. By the end, the title’s cuts no longer resemble wounds alone. They are openings made through density, revealing how much information can exist inside what initially sounds like a single wall.