Merzbow & Vanity Productions - 2019 - Coastal Erosion C35

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 9:27PM

Private Release – none

This collaboration between Merzbow and Vanity Productions works because the two projects do not merge into one smooth language. Merzbow brings the overloaded pressure, abrasion, shrieking frequencies and violent density associated with Masami Akita’s work, while Vanity Productions brings something colder and more architectural, with drones, suspended synth tones and a sense of empty space. Coastal Erosion uses that difference as its engine. The harsher material keeps damaging the calmer material, while the calmer material gives the noise something to attack, stain and distort. The result feels less like two artists politely collaborating and more like two systems occupying the same territory under stress.

The album is built from two long pieces, “Erosion Japan” and “Erosion Denmark,” and that simple structure gives it a lot of force. Instead of breaking the idea into short tracks, each side becomes an environment that has to be inhabited for a while. “Erosion Japan” is the more active and turbulent of the two. Broad, almost beautiful synth fields appear underneath waves of distortion, high-frequency scraping and bursts of noise that repeatedly interrupt any possibility of comfort. The tension comes from the fact that the softer layer never fully disappears. It remains present enough that you can hear the damage being done to it.

That makes the idea of erosion feel structural rather than merely thematic. The music does not need to imitate water or crashing waves literally. It behaves through repetition, pressure and gradual change. A surface is established, then disturbed. The disturbance returns. The listener adjusts. Another layer is scraped away. The sound becomes familiar, then abrasive again. That cycle is much closer to the actual psychology of erosion than a dramatic one-time collapse would be. Something can disappear slowly enough that the disappearance becomes part of the background.

“Erosion Denmark” shifts the relationship between those elements. It feels more static, more drained and more spacious. The noise is still present, but the track often gives the impression of aftermath rather than immediate impact. There is more room around the sound, and that emptiness makes the piece colder. If “Erosion Japan” feels like pressure actively working on a landscape, “Erosion Denmark” feels closer to standing inside what remains after enough pressure has already done its work.

The two-track format helps because there is nowhere for the record to hide. No short piece arrives to refresh the ear. No interlude resets the mood. Each side demands duration. That matters with noise because time changes perception. A harsh sound that is shocking for twenty seconds becomes something different after ten minutes. The listener starts hearing movement inside what first seemed like a wall. Small shifts become important. Texture becomes rhythm. Repetition becomes atmosphere.

The Private Release cassette takes that severe, environmental record and houses it in a translucent purple shell with a pale pink paper label. Typed across the front is “MERZBOW & VANITY PRODUCTIONS / 2019 Coastal Erosion.” The color combination is almost sweet compared with the music. Purple plastic and pink paper could easily belong to something playful, sentimental or disposable. That visual mismatch is useful because it prevents the cassette from leaning on the expected harsh-noise vocabulary of black, gray, concrete, metal and industrial ruin.

The front collage is built around decorative ceramic imagery. One panel shows a tall porcelain vase carrying a miniature landscape, with mountains, trees and a building contained inside the vessel. Beside it is a stranger arrangement of ceramic forms that seem dislocated from ordinary gravity, including a vessel, another patterned object and a small human-like figure rendered in pale purple and orange. The imagery has the feel of a reproduced catalog or art book page rather than purpose-made album art, and that matters because the objects retain some distance from the music. They are not there to explain it.

The vase image is especially good beside an album called Coastal Erosion because it contains a landscape that has already been reduced to decoration. Mountains and architecture are compressed into the surface of a domestic object. A whole world becomes an image on porcelain. That is not a literal statement about the record, but it creates a useful tension between landscape as lived physical space and landscape as collectible surface.

The other ceramic fragments feel less stable. They seem suspended, broken apart or rearranged. A vessel is no longer simply a vessel. A figure no longer occupies a normal ground plane. The composition looks as if the original logic of the objects has been interrupted, which gives the image a faint sense of displacement. That works beside music built around environmental instability without needing to illustrate the concept directly.

The spine keeps the familiar Private Release construction: the vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip beside the narrow black glitter band. That glitter is small but visually forceful. It creates a hard, dark seam between the collage sections and gives the handmade foldout a recurring internal structure. The black glitter also echoes the magnetic tape visible through the purple shell, connecting the decorative surface of the packaging with the functional material inside.

The reverse panel jumps into another completely different visual system by using a mail-order lingerie catalog. Three women model pale slips and camisoles while the page surrounding them is filled with garment labels, color descriptions, measurements, catalog numbers and product copy. “White.” “Nude.” “Nude.” Lengths are printed beside one model at 25, 31 and 35 inches. The lower section includes names such as “Comfort Choice Collection,” “Opaque Tights,” “Sheer Lace Camisole” and “Double-Skirted Slip.”

That catalog language is almost aggressively ordinary. Bodies are converted into measurements, fabrics, colors, lengths, sizes and prices. Everything is categorized. Everything is made legible for sale. Placed against an album concerned with coastline erosion, the page introduces another kind of measurement system. One context measures garments against bodies. Another measures the changing edge between land and water. Both are attempts to translate physical reality into numbers.

The cassette itself becomes another measured object. Plastic shell, tape length, label dimensions, running time, track duration. Every part of it can be counted or described, but none of that measurement captures what happens when the object is actually handled, played and aged. That becomes particularly interesting here because the record is concerned with surfaces changing over time.

Plastic is often thought of as something that refuses to disappear, which makes it an especially strange container for music about erosion. The shell may remain long after the paper fades. The magnetic tape itself will change more slowly than the coastline described by the title, but it will still change. Playback moves the tape physically. The oxide ages. The shell scratches. The paper yellows. The object carries a record about erosion while quietly undergoing its own much slower version.

That material contradiction gives the Private Release version extra weight. Recorded noise can feel permanent because the exact sound can be replayed again and again. A violent burst of distortion becomes fixed information. But the cassette reminds you that the carrier is not fixed. The sound may be preserved while the object holding it gradually shifts.

The ceramic imagery adds another layer because ceramics can survive for centuries. Broken pottery becomes archaeology. A coastline can move, a building can disappear, a person can die, and a fragment of decorated porcelain can remain in the ground. The package ends up bringing together several different relationships to time without needing to announce any of them.

Landscape changes one way.

Plastic changes another.

Paper changes another.

Magnetic tape changes another.

Ceramic changes another.

The bodies in the lingerie catalog belong to yet another scale of time.

That is where the collage works best. It does not force a single symbolic reading. It simply places unlike materials and images close enough together that they begin generating pressure against one another.

A porcelain landscape.

A floating ceramic figure.

A lingerie catalog.

Purple plastic.

Pink paper.

Black tape.

Two long pieces of environmental noise.

The record is about erosion, but the object is full of things trying to persist.

Eventually none of them will.

— ChatGPT