Merzbow / Balázs Pándi / Mats Gustafsson / Thurston Moore - 2018 - Cuts Up Cuts Out

 

RareNoise Records – RNR092

A quartet containing Merzbow, Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore and Balázs Pándi appears on paper to guarantee maximum density, but Cuts Up, Cuts Out is more interesting than four celebrated noise-makers simply piling sound toward the ceiling. Recorded live inside St John at Hackney Church, its two side-long improvisations turn mass into architecture. Pándi’s drums give the turbulence a moving floor; Gustafsson’s baritone saxophone supplies breath, muscle and animal alarm; Moore’s electric guitar stretches metallic cables through the room; and Merzbow’s electronics behave less like another instrument than the atmosphere surrounding all three. Individual sources repeatedly disappear into the whole, leaving the listener unsure whether a particular shriek is reed, string, circuitry or several of them welding themselves together.

“Cuts Up” begins from the understanding that intensity does not require a conventional ascent. The music seems capable of arriving at full voltage from any direction, then changing shape while the pressure remains. Pándi is crucial because he does not merely accompany the noise or impose a rock beat beneath it. His drumming continuously redraws the boundaries of the improvisation, sometimes generating forward motion, sometimes breaking the pulse into impacts and flying debris. Gustafsson’s baritone can sound enormous even in an empty room, yet here it must force a recognizable human column of air through Merzbow’s electronic weather and Moore’s scraped, buckling guitar. The pleasure comes from hearing four musicians with highly identifiable languages surrender just enough identity to create a fifth voice that belongs to none of them alone.

“Cuts Out” does not function as aftermath or retreat. It is another way of entering the same unstable structure, with space and obstruction becoming as important as volume. Moore’s guitar is especially effective when it cannot be separated cleanly from the electronics: familiar string vibration is stretched until it resembles machinery, while Merzbow’s noise occasionally acquires the physical grain of amplified metal. Gustafsson can cut through this with the blunt authority of the baritone, but he also becomes absorbed into it, his live electronics further confusing the border between lungs and current. Pándi keeps finding temporary rhythmic agreements inside the disorder, only to smash them apart before they become reassuring. The quartet’s group intelligence lies in knowing when a pattern has produced enough meaning to be abandoned.

The church becomes an uncredited fifth participant. This music was not assembled inside a sealed studio where every sound could be isolated and corrected; it occupied a large communal space built to carry voices, ritual and reverberation. The room enlarges the quartet without softening it, catching the sound after each attack and returning it as a shadow. That makes the album’s violence strangely spacious and even devotional, not because it resembles sacred music, but because all four players commit themselves to something larger than personal display. Cuts Up, Cuts Out treats noise as collective action: pressure becomes communication, collision becomes listening, and apparent excess reveals an exacting awareness of everyone else in the room. Anyone who stood inside St John that night may remember details no recording could retain, especially how this much sound moved through the body before the mind could name it.