Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1990 - Tokyo Rose

 

Alfa – ALCA-3  339.16MB FLAC

By 1990, Toshinori Kondo & IMA no longer sounded like an avant-jazz group experimenting with funk. On Tokyo Rose, funk, amplified rock, industrial repetition, turntable manipulation and free improvisation have fused into a complete language of their own. The album is loud, crowded and frequently abrasive, but it is not shapeless. Hideo Yamaki’s extraordinarily mobile drumming holds its ten tracks together while electric bass, guitar and keyboards construct a restless urban environment around Kondo’s amplified trumpet and confrontational voice. This is IMA at its most public and aggressive: music built to communicate immediately, then disturb whatever message seemed to arrive.
Released by Alfa in February 1990, Tokyo Rose presents the established IMA unit of Kondo, keyboardist Haruo Togashi, drummer-percussionist Yamaki, and Reck and Taizo Sakai on electric guitar and bass. DJ Takada contributes scratches to “Purple Haze” and “No More Border Line,” while Asuka Kaneko adds electric violin to “Timeless Man.” The instrumental assignments appear conventional on paper, but their functions continually overlap. Guitar becomes percussion or electrical noise; keyboards can act as atmosphere, harmony or machinery; Kondo’s voice imitates instrumental attack; and his trumpet sometimes resembles a signal being overloaded at its source.
The title carries unavoidable historical static. “Tokyo Rose” was the name Allied troops applied to women heard on Japanese wartime propaganda broadcasts, making it an image of transmission, seduction and unreliable information. Kondo’s Tokyo is likewise heard through mediation. Voices become slogans, scratches interrupt instrumental continuity, and recognizable genres arrive in distorted form. The city is neither celebrated as a technological wonder nor condemned as pure alienation. It is presented as a field of competing signals in which politics, entertainment, tradition and commodity culture struggle to be heard at once.
“China Demonstration” opens the album with no ambiguity about its immediate political context. Written in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, it denounces state violence and insists that the struggle for freedom must not be forgotten. The directness of Kondo’s words is matched by the band’s attack. This is not a reflective lament delivered from a safe distance. Yamaki drives the music forward, guitar and keyboards create a charged perimeter, and Kondo alternates between vocal declaration and electric-trumpet blasts. His horn does not decorate the statement; it becomes another form of protest, forcing breath into an electronically magnified cry.
The piece also establishes the album’s productive contradiction. Tokyo Rose uses the scale and immediacy of rock while refusing rock’s normal hierarchies. Kondo is the frontman, but he does not stand above the band as a stable personality. His voice can be rough, exaggerated and intentionally unmusical, while his trumpet is often absorbed into the collective noise. Reck’s punk history with Friction remains audible in the guitar’s abrasive economy. Togashi avoids providing comfortable harmonic padding. Most importantly, Yamaki’s drums make repetition feel volatile. He can maintain a pounding pulse while changing its internal balance from one measure to the next.
“F1 Republic” turns speed into political and technological fantasy. Its title suggests a nation organized according to Formula One values: velocity, machinery, competition and spectacle. The band responds with music that seems perpetually on the verge of outrunning itself. Yet the rhythm is not merely fast. Yamaki’s accents make it jump and swerve, while bass and guitar create a hard, forward-thrusting surface. Kondo plays like someone attempting to communicate from inside the engine. His processed trumpet can sound triumphant for an instant before its tone frays into alarm.
IMA’s version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” is the album’s most recognizable point of entry, but it is not a reverent rock cover. Hendrix’s composition already blurred riff, studio technology and psychedelic disorientation, making it unusually compatible with Kondo’s methods. DJ Takada’s scratching further dislocates the song, placing a late-1960s guitar icon inside the turntable culture of 1990. Kondo does not try to reproduce Hendrix’s vocal authority or substitute trumpet for the famous guitar part in any orderly fashion. The group breaks the song’s familiarity into rhythm, noise and electronically altered memory.
“Timeless Man” offers a broader, more dramatic space. Asuka Kaneko’s electric violin introduces another sustained, highly malleable voice beside Kondo’s trumpet. The two instruments can suggest lyricism, but amplification removes any guarantee of refinement. Their lines stretch, collide and acquire metallic edges over the rhythm section. The title proposes escape from historical time, yet the track is saturated with period technologies. That tension makes it compelling: the “timeless” figure can only be imagined through instruments, effects and production techniques unmistakably belonging to a particular moment.
“Kimatta Oretachi” is shorter and more concentrated. Its title roughly suggests “we’ve decided,” “we’re set” or “we’ve got it,” depending upon context, and the performance carries the swagger of a collective slogan. Kondo’s vocal style is central. He does not sing in the polished manner expected of a jazz musician attempting crossover success. He barks, chants and pushes syllables rhythmically, preserving the grain of an unruly individual inside a tightly amplified group. The track approaches pop-song scale without surrendering IMA’s deliberate coarseness.
The middle of the album reveals more emotional range than its industrial-funk reputation might suggest. “Misora” allows air into the arrangement, while “Kanashii”—“sad”—makes vulnerability explicit. Kondo’s trumpet is especially effective when a melodic fragment rises out of a hostile electronic setting. Because his tone has been subjected to so much pressure elsewhere, a relatively open phrase can feel startlingly exposed. The band does not become gentle, but it allows melancholy to exist within the machinery. Kondo’s great strength is his refusal to treat tenderness and aggression as opposites. A cry can contain both.
“No More Border Line” returns to declaration. DJ Takada’s scratches make the border itself audible as interruption: recorded material is stopped, dragged backward and inserted into a live ensemble. The title’s internationalist sentiment corresponds to IMA’s longstanding refusal of musical boundaries, but the performance does not offer a frictionless global mixture. Crossing borders produces collisions. Funk, punk, jazz, Japanese vocal gesture and hip-hop technique retain their separate histories even as the band forces them into a common rhythmic field. The result is cosmopolitan without becoming decorative “world music.”
“Cool Okesa” brings Japanese folk inheritance directly into that field. Okesa refers to a family of folk songs and dances, most famously associated with Sado Island. Kondo’s title treats the tradition with playful informality rather than ceremonial reverence. The piece does not attempt an authentic reconstruction. Instead, it asks how a folk identity might persist inside electric urban music. IMA had explored related questions since Taihen, but here the meeting is sharper and more compressed. Tradition is neither protected from modernity nor erased by it; it is made to negotiate.
“Metal Bind” closes the album with an image of attachment and confinement. Metal is both IMA’s sonic material and a structure capable of trapping what it contains. The rhythm section tightens, the electronic surfaces harden, and Kondo’s trumpet again struggles between expressive voice and processed object. Ending here gives the album no reassuring release. Its city remains active, wired and restrictive. The musicians have found freedom inside that system, but they have not pretended to escape it.
The record’s density can become exhausting. Nearly every track insists upon high contrast, and Kondo’s vocals will challenge listeners who prefer his more spacious trumpet work. Some synthesizer tones and drum treatments are unmistakably of their period. The sheer number of stylistic confrontations can also make individual compositions seem less distinct on a first hearing. Yet Yamaki’s rhythmic imagination prevents the repeated grooves from becoming truly static, and the concise track lengths keep the record moving.
Tokyo Rose stands as one of IMA’s clearest statements because it converts contradiction into momentum. It is political but playful, technologically fascinated but suspicious of technology, rooted in Japanese experience yet aggressively international. Even its Hendrix cover becomes an argument about circulation and transformation. At the center is Kondo’s electric trumpet, still powered by the most elementary musical fact—human breath—but enlarged, damaged and broadcast through modern machinery. Tokyo Rose does not resolve the noise of its city. It becomes one of its strongest transmissions.

Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1993 - Red City Smoke

 

Jaro Medien – JARO 4173-2  320.66MB FLAC

Red City Smoke opens like an alarm from a metropolis already past the point of emergency. “Space Killer” combines a heavy, digitally sharpened rhythm with layers of guitar, keyboard and electronic noise, while Toshinori Kondo’s trumpet tears across the surface like a transmission forcing its way through interference. His voice is equally confrontational: less conventional singing than a mixture of command, chant and urban prophecy. The production has the hard, sample-conscious impact of early-1990s hip-hop and industrial dance music, but IMA never submits completely to either style. The music is too rhythmically unstable, too crowded with instrumental personalities and too willing to interrupt itself.
Released by Moon Records in October 1993, Red City Smoke became the final studio album by the original Kondo IMA project. Kondo announced the group’s dissolution at the end of that year and subsequently moved his base to Amsterdam, beginning the outdoor solo undertaking he called “Blow the Earth.” That later history makes it tempting to hear this record exclusively as a farewell to city life. The album certainly supports that interpretation—its titles are full of smoke, battle zones, killers, lovers and sorrow—but it does not sound like a band quietly packing its equipment. It sounds energized by the very urban pressure Kondo was preparing to leave.
The lineup differs significantly from the familiar IMA configuration heard on Tokyo Rose. Reck is absent, removing one of the band’s most abrasive electric personalities. Taizo Sakai carries the guitar role, Hideo Yamaki remains the rhythmic engine, and Haruo Togashi contributes keyboards and keyboard bass. Takahiro Watanabe also plays keyboard bass, while guitarist Mari Nishizono appears and adds vocals to “Moon Dream.” Kondo supplies electric trumpet, voice and keyboard bass. This altered instrumentation gives the record a more synthetic low end. Instead of a traditional bass guitar consistently grounding the music, programmed and keyboard-generated bass sounds become part of the album’s technological architecture.
That change does not make the performances less physical. Yamaki remains one of the most important reasons IMA’s electronic music avoids rigidity. His drumming can hit with machine-like precision, but he continually disturbs the apparent grid through displaced accents, compact fills and abrupt changes in weight. On “Space Killer” and “New Girl,” the rhythm feels engineered for immediate impact, yet small variations prevent it from becoming a static loop. Kondo understood that repetition becomes powerful when the listener can feel both its attraction and its threat. The beat invites movement while suggesting a system that may not permit anyone to stop.
“Temptation Flower” introduces a more sensuous dimension without softening the album’s surfaces. The flower of the title is attractive precisely because it may be dangerous. Kondo’s trumpet occupies that ambiguity. Effects enlarge and distort the tone, but his breath remains audible inside the electronic shell. He can produce a line of striking beauty and then break it with a hoarse attack or upward smear. The electric trumpet never functions merely as a fashionable texture. It is the unstable human center of the music: a voice whose physical source remains recognizable even when technology stretches it toward feedback, siren and synthetic light.
Across the opening half, Red City Smoke frequently resembles a science-fiction broadcast assembled from funk, hip-hop, avant-rock and damaged pop. “New Girl” places another human figure inside that environment, recalling IMA titles such as “Tea Girl,” “H-Woman” and “Tokyo Girl.” Kondo repeatedly used these compressed character types to investigate the point where an individual becomes an urban image. The “new girl” might be a person, a commodity, a fantasy or an identity continually reconstructed by fashion and media. The music refuses to distinguish neatly between excitement and alienation. Its brightness is genuine, but so is its suspicion.
“Lovers, Hold Up!” condenses that approach into one of the disc’s shortest and most direct songs. The title sounds like romantic advice interrupted by a robbery command. Love and danger occupy the same phrase, just as dance rhythm and sonic aggression occupy the same arrangement. Kondo’s vocals are crucial because their roughness prevents the material from becoming polished avant-pop. He does not present himself as a technically immaculate singer. He pushes words into the music until they become rhythmic objects, often sounding more like someone addressing a crowd through a failing public-address system than a vocalist performing inside a controlled studio.
“Blue Sky Battle Zone” contains the album’s strongest visual contradiction. An open blue sky ordinarily signifies freedom, calm or natural space; a battle zone transforms that openness into exposed territory. The title anticipates the division that would soon shape Kondo’s work. He was increasingly drawn toward playing trumpet outdoors, attempting to enter into dialogue with mountains, deserts, rivers and weather, yet he remained surrounded by the machinery and social conflict of the city. Here, the blue sky can still only be imagined through dense electric instrumentation. Nature appears as a contested possibility rather than a peaceful refuge.
The title track arrives at the album’s midpoint and presents the city as atmosphere. Smoke obscures objects without completely hiding them, changes the color of light and enters the lungs. It is an ideal image for Kondo’s music, which repeatedly blurs the line between external environment and internal bodily experience. Togashi’s contribution is particularly striking here, including a forceful piano passage that cuts through the electronic setting without sounding nostalgic. Acoustic piano does not restore an older, purer jazz language. It becomes another volatile material inside the red haze, percussive and urgent.
The album’s production is cleaner and more forceful than IMA’s mid-1980s records, but clarity does not mean simplicity. Sounds are placed with considerable definition, allowing drums and synthetic bass to land heavily while trumpet, guitar and keyboards retain separate profiles. At the same time, the arrangements contain enough competing information to create deliberate overload. This is where comparisons to Public Enemy’s densely layered production make sense, although IMA’s method remains grounded in band interaction. The record borrows hip-hop’s understanding of sound as collision without turning Kondo into a conventional rapper or Yamaki into a servant of sampled rhythm.
“SEQ57” reduces the language of the city to something resembling a machine designation. The title appears as “SEQ 57” on the Japanese release, though some later listings render it as “Sea 57.” The former better suits the album’s fascination with systems, coded identities and synthetic sequence. Its compact form functions as a hinge between the record’s urban confrontation and its more expansive closing movement. By this point, IMA’s sound no longer depends upon easily identifiable jazz solos placed over funk. Improvisation operates inside texture and timing: an accent arriving early, a trumpet tone deforming, a guitar figure refusing to resolve.
“Big Joy” is not merely comic relief after the album’s darker imagery. Kondo treats joy as an overwhelming physical force, large enough to become disruptive. The piece carries the rhythmic accessibility that had allowed IMA to reach listeners outside experimental jazz, but it retains the band’s refusal of smoothness. Joy is shouted, amplified and hammered into the beat. It is not offered as relaxation. The title also matters within the album’s emotional design. After killers, temptation, battle and smoke, pleasure has to become equally forceful if it is to survive.
The closing pair moves decisively toward another state. “Moon Dream,” whose Japanese title invokes kachōfūgetsu—flowers, birds, wind and moon—introduces an old aesthetic vocabulary of attentiveness to nature and seasonal beauty. Mari Nishizono’s voice and guitar help give the piece a different emotional color, but the transition is not a retreat into traditional serenity. The electronic city remains audible. Kondo seems to be looking for the moon through its smoke, searching for an elemental image that has not yet been separated from human machinery.
“Beyond the Sorrow” ends the album in just over three minutes. Its brevity prevents it from becoming a monumental farewell, yet its placement makes it difficult not to hear as a threshold. The phrase does not deny sorrow; it asks what might exist on the other side of it. Kondo’s trumpet, capable throughout the record of sounding hostile or electronically armored, reveals its underlying vulnerability. Breath once again becomes the essential fact. After all the synthetic bass, amplified percussion and urban imagery, a human being still has to inhale before the next sound can occur.
The album is not without weaknesses. Its early-1990s production can feel emphatically period-specific, particularly when synthetic bass and programmed textures crowd the middle frequencies. Kondo’s English titles and vocal declarations occasionally approach slogan rather than fully developed language. The compact song format also limits the long-form collective improvisation that made IMA’s concerts so dangerous. Listeners drawn to Kondo through his work with Peter Brötzmann or Derek Bailey may find parts of the record overly constructed, while listeners approaching it as acid jazz may find it far too abrasive.
Those tensions are precisely what make Red City Smoke more than a period crossover exercise. It is the sound of a band that had spent nearly a decade refusing the divisions between free jazz, funk, punk, electronics, folk memory and popular spectacle. Instead of resolving those contradictions on its final album, IMA intensifies them. The first half confronts the city through science-fiction rhythm and overloaded communication; the second begins searching for joy, moonlight and a place beyond sorrow. Kondo would soon leave this band structure and take his electric trumpet into open landscapes. Red City Smoke captures the last moment before that departure, when the urban machine was still producing enough pressure, danger and beauty to demand one final answer.

Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1991 - God-Zilla Funk

 

Alfa – ALCA-153  450.02MB FLAC

Despite its imposing title, God・Zilla Funk is not a newly recorded Toshinori Kondo & IMA studio album, nor does it contain a composition called “Godzilla Funk.” It is a carefully sequenced 1991 CD compilation that draws together eleven pieces from the group’s preceding phase: studio material from Human Market and Tokyo Rose, the “(Lots of) Chemical Mix” of “Tokyo Girl,” and three performances from the Australian live album Kamikaze Blow. That distinction matters. Heard as a conventional album, its abrupt changes in ambience and production may seem inconsistent. Heard as a deliberately oversized demonstration of IMA’s late-1980s sound, it becomes a forceful portrait of a band whose music had grown too unruly for any single genre.
Alfa released the disc on June 21, 1991, only sixteen days after the new IMA album Brain War. Its generous CD-era running time allows it to behave as both compilation and sustained physical experience. The title breaks “Godzilla” into “God” and “Zilla,” enlarging funk into something monstrous, urban and nearly mythological. Godzilla is an especially appropriate image for IMA: a Japanese creature born from technological catastrophe, moving through the modern city as both destroyer and strangely sympathetic outsider. Kondo’s electric trumpet often plays a comparable role, towering over the rhythm section while sounding wounded by the same machinery that magnifies it.
The disc begins with three selections from Human Market: “Last Lost,” “Banana Plantation” and “Hoppoh.” This opening establishes IMA’s mature ensemble sound before the compilation introduces remixes or live recordings. Kondo’s electric trumpet and rough vocals stand at the center, with Haruo Togashi on keyboards and backing voice, Reck and Taizo Sakai exchanging guitar and bass functions, and Hideo Yamaki supplying drums and percussion. Rather than treating funk as a stable foundation for jazz solos, the group turns every groove into contested territory. Bass and drums generate forward movement while guitar, keyboards and trumpet continually interfere with its apparent security.
“Last Lost” is an ideal beginning because its title announces disorientation twice. The rhythm carries the listener forward, but the arrangement never reveals a comfortable destination. Yamaki’s drumming is precise without becoming mechanical; he makes small changes in emphasis that alter the balance of the entire group. Kondo’s trumpet appears as a compressed, amplified human cry. Effects can extend the instrument toward feedback or siren, yet the physical pressure of breath remains audible. That tension—body against circuitry—is the essential IMA sound.
“Banana Plantation” makes the band’s funk more obviously muscular. Its title places tropical color beside the concealed realities of agricultural labor and commodity exchange, although Kondo does not reduce the piece to a simple political illustration. The groove is pleasurable and coercive at once. It moves the body while suggesting a larger economic machine. Reck and Sakai’s ability to exchange bass and guitar duties gives the performance an unusual internal flexibility. The instrument providing weight in one piece may become the abrasive voice in another.
“Hoppoh,” meaning “north” or “northern direction,” expands the cultural field. Its original Human Market appearance included nohkan and ōtsuzumi, instruments associated with Noh theater, placed inside IMA’s electric environment. The result is not polite East-meets-West fusion. Traditional sounds retain their piercing attack and historical character while confronting keyboards, modern drums and processed trumpet. On God・Zilla Funk, the piece completes an opening movement in which urban rhythm, commodity imagery and Japanese theatrical memory have already been forced into the same system.
The fourth selection, “Tokyo Girl (Lots of Chemical Mix),” changes the album’s surface. Originally issued in connection with the 1988 “Tokyo Girl” single, the mix exaggerates the song’s synthetic, commercial brightness. Female backing voices and an insistent hook make it one of IMA’s closest approaches to pop, yet the word “chemical” correctly signals that its appeal is manufactured and unstable. The Tokyo girl can be heard simultaneously as a person, media image and product of the city’s cultural laboratory. The mix enjoys its own artificiality while refusing to let that artificiality seem innocent.
This is one of the compilation’s most revealing transitions. “Hoppoh” looks toward inherited ceremonial language; “Tokyo Girl” enters the present tense of advertising, fashion and accelerated metropolitan identity. Kondo treats neither as pure. Tradition is already capable of disruption, while pop modernity carries its own ritual repetitions. IMA’s music thrives in the gap between them. The band is not searching for a tasteful synthesis but for the energy released when incompatible social meanings share the same beat.
The middle of God・Zilla Funk shifts abruptly to the live Australian recordings “Yami,” “96” and “Y・U.” The change in sound is immediate. Studio separation gives way to congested stage air, instruments bleed into one another, and the rhythm section acquires a heavier physical presence. “Yami,” meaning darkness, feels like an entrance into the band’s least polished environment. Kondo can no longer depend upon mixing decisions to place his trumpet in the foreground. He has to project through Yamaki’s drums, amplified bass, guitar and Togashi’s keyboards.
This pressure improves the music. Kondo does not merely increase his volume; he alters the shape of his phrases, using short attacks to cut through the ensemble and long electronic cries to bend the whole field around him. “96” compresses that violence into a short, concentrated performance, while “Y・U” stretches to nearly twelve minutes. The latter becomes the compilation’s huge central mass. Its title can be heard as “why you,” turning the repeated vocal and instrumental gestures into an extended interrogation. The composition outgrows the efficient proportions of the studio and continues by collective momentum.
The length of “Y・U” is crucial to the compilation’s architecture. After several five- and six-minute pieces, its twelve-minute sprawl feels genuinely monstrous. This is the “Zilla” in the title: funk enlarged beyond commercial usefulness, still walking after the normal song should have ended. Repetition ceases to be merely catchy and becomes environmental. The listener is placed inside the groove, where every guitar abrasion, keyboard shift and trumpet blast alters the apparent dimensions of the space.
The final four tracks return to the sharper studio world of Tokyo Rose. “F1 Republic,” “Timeless Man,” “Misora” and “No More Border Line” show how IMA’s music had become harder and more internationally directed by 1990. “F1 Republic” imagines a society governed by speed, machinery, competition and spectacle. Its rhythm does not simply move quickly; it suggests permanent acceleration. Kondo sounds as though he is transmitting from inside the engine, his trumpet briefly triumphant before its tone breaks into warning.
“Timeless Man” introduces Asuka Kaneko’s electric violin, giving Kondo another electronically extended melodic voice to confront. Trumpet and violin can both sustain lyrical lines, but their amplified surfaces keep them from becoming comfortably expressive. The title promises escape from history, while the track’s technology fixes it unmistakably within the turn of the 1990s. “Misora” then opens a more spacious emotional area, allowing the trumpet to expose some of the vulnerability concealed beneath the album’s hard rhythmic exterior.
“No More Border Line” provides the proper ending. DJ Takada’s scratching turns the act of crossing a boundary into an audible process: recorded sound is stopped, moved backward and reinserted into a live-band framework. The title expresses IMA’s internationalist musical philosophy, but the track avoids the soft idealism often associated with “borderless” fusion. Borders do not disappear without friction. Punk guitar, funk bass, hip-hop technique, Japanese vocal gestures and avant-garde trumpet retain their distinct histories even while occupying the same arrangement.
As a compilation, God・Zilla Funk inevitably repeats material available elsewhere, and listeners who own Human Market, Kamikaze Blow and Tokyo Rose receive little that is truly unavailable beyond the “Tokyo Girl” mix and this particular sequencing. Its production changes can also be jarring. The Human Market selections sound carefully shaped, the Australian performances are rougher and more spacious, and the Tokyo Rose material arrives with a denser early-1990s attack. Yet those discontinuities reveal how IMA’s music changed when moved between studio, remix and stage.
The disc also avoids functioning like a conventional greatest-hits package. It omits obvious landmarks such as “China Demonstration,” “Purple Haze” and the title track from Red City Smoke, which had not yet been recorded. Instead, it favors a sustained argument about rhythm, urban identity and boundary crossing. The sequence moves from the unstable marketplace, through chemically enhanced pop and live darkness, toward speed, timelessness and the rejection of borders.
God・Zilla Funk is therefore best understood as an alternate IMA album assembled from existing components. It magnifies the group’s contradictions until they resemble the monster promised by the title. The music is danceable but abrasive, technological but intensely bodily, internationally minded but rooted in specific Japanese histories. Its changing sound quality becomes part of the experience, as though the same enormous creature were being observed in different cities and under different forms of light. At the center, Kondo continues to blow human breath through metal and electricity, creating a voice large enough to walk straight through the walls separating jazz, funk, punk and electronic music.

Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1986 - Konton

 

Epic/Sony – 32・8H-71  233.72MB FLAC

Konton begins at sundown and finishes with something called “Gan,” moving through darkness, cryptic initials, shifting sand and a chant of “YoYoYo” along the way. The titles suggest fragments of a journey, but Toshinori Kondo & IMA offer no explanatory narrative. Instead, the six pieces form a compact thirty-five-minute passage through electric rhythm, amplified trumpet, Korean percussion and mid-1980s digital technology. Released by Epic/Sony in June 1986, the album turns the hard urban surfaces of Metal Position into something deeper and more spacious. It still moves with considerable force, but its grooves now contain shadows, ritual implications and sudden areas of open air.
The title means chaos, confusion or primordial disorder. Yet Konton is not chaotic in the obvious free-jazz sense. The music is tightly organized, often built from repeated bass figures, disciplined drums and clearly defined electronic textures. Its chaos exists inside the mixture. Japanese electric jazz and punk musicians work alongside Bill Laswell’s New York production ideas, Nicky Skopelitis’s Fairlight programming and Kim Duk-soo’s Korean percussion. Acoustic impact meets digital sampling; Kondo’s breath-driven trumpet confronts rhythm produced by both hands and machines. The album does not blur these sources into a smooth global fusion. It preserves enough difference for friction to remain audible.
IMA’s core lineup has settled into the form that would carry it through much of the next several years. Kondo plays trumpet, Haruo Togashi keyboards, Taizo Sakai electric guitar, Reck electric guitar and bass, and Hideo Yamaki drums. The shift to Reck as the principal bassist is significant. Earlier IMA recordings depended heavily upon the American funk foundation supplied by Rodney Drummer, but Konton develops a more angular internal pulse. Reck’s bass is forceful without becoming comfortably rounded, and Yamaki’s drumming can lock tightly to it while placing sharp accents against the expected beat. The groove remains physical, but it feels less inherited from an established funk vocabulary.
Bill Laswell produces and contributes electric bass, continuing a relationship with Kondo that had already shaped Taihen and the “China Boogie” single. His presence is unmistakable in the album’s low-frequency architecture and sharply separated layers, but Konton does not sound like an IMA performance placed inside a generic Laswell production. Kondo’s compositions and the band’s distinctive timing resist that. Laswell gives the music depth, impact and international studio scale; IMA fills that space with unstable gestures. The rhythm may be mixed with tremendous clarity, but Kondo’s trumpet behaves as though clarity itself needs to be damaged.
“Sundown” introduces the record through collaboration. Credited to Togashi, Laswell and Skopelitis, it places Fairlight programming beside keyboards and heavy electric bass. The technology is period-specific, but it is not used merely to demonstrate novelty. Digital sounds create a horizon against which the physical instruments become more vivid. The track’s title suggests the transition from visible day into uncertainty, and the arrangement proceeds in the same way. Its opening structure is easy to grasp, yet the details gradually alter the emotional temperature. By the time Kondo is fully present, the groove has become less an invitation to dance than an environment through which the trumpet must navigate.
Kondo’s sound is more concentrated here than on Metal Position. He is credited simply with trumpet rather than the larger collection of voice, speaker and synthetic-percussion roles listed on the previous album. That apparent reduction sharpens his identity. His tone can still appear electrically magnified, smeared or compressed, but the fundamental action remains unmistakable: air is forced through brass and projected against an artificial landscape. Kondo rarely treats the groove as a platform for a conventional solo. He enters at angles, leaves phrases unresolved and uses changes in tone as structural events. A single sustained note can make the rhythm underneath it seem suddenly ominous.
“Yami,” meaning darkness, deepens the nocturnal atmosphere. The band does not represent darkness through mere slowness or ambient emptiness. It remains active and rhythmically alert, but the spaces between instrumental attacks begin to feel more consequential. Togashi’s keyboards supply color without offering reassurance, while guitar creates clipped shapes and flashes of abrasion. Yamaki’s drums hold the music together through precision rather than heaviness alone. The track demonstrates one of IMA’s central discoveries: a steady beat can increase uncertainty when the sounds surrounding it refuse to explain themselves.
“Y.U.” completes the first side and would become one of IMA’s major live vehicles. Its studio version lasts a little over six minutes, while the performance later released on Kamikaze Blow nearly doubles that length. Even here, the composition contains the potential for expansion. The title can be heard as “why you,” though the initials remain deliberately open. Repetition turns the phrase into an interrogation without a stated subject. The band accumulates intensity instead of chasing a conventional verse-chorus payoff. Kondo’s trumpet and the rhythm section appear to question one another, and the music’s force comes from the refusal to provide a final answer.
The second side opens with Togashi’s “Sandswitch,” the album’s most suggestive compound title. Sand shifts naturally, but a switch implies abrupt mechanical control. The piece lives between those forms of movement. Keyboards and programmed elements can change the environment instantly, while drums, bass and guitar create slower alterations in texture and weight. Togashi is essential throughout Konton because he does not use synthesizers simply to modernize jazz harmony. His electronic tones behave as weather, architecture and interference. They define the space in which Kondo plays while remaining capable of changing that space beneath him.
Kim Duk-soo brings a different conception of time and impact to the record. A major figure in Korean samul nori, he is credited with changgo—the hourglass-shaped drum—and kkwaenggwari, a small gong capable of cutting through dense ensembles. These instruments are not presented as a picturesque “traditional” interlude. Their physical attacks enter the electric framework as contemporary rhythmic information. The metallic gong is particularly compatible with IMA’s aesthetic: ancient in lineage but capable of sounding as sharp and disruptive as any electronic percussion. Kondo’s internationalism works best in moments like these, when collaboration creates genuine pressure rather than a decorative display of cultural variety.
“YoYoYo,” also credited to Togashi, Laswell and Skopelitis, brings the technological and vocal implications of the album into a compact form, even though Kondo is not formally credited as a singer here. Its repeated syllables function less like lyrics than a rhythmic signal. The Fairlight allows sound to be captured, organized and reintroduced as an object, matching IMA’s tendency to treat fragments of voice as percussion. The track feels playful, but its play has a mechanical edge. A simple human utterance can become a loop, slogan or command once technology removes it from ordinary conversation.
“Gan” closes the album with its longest performance. The romanized title is left unexplained, and the music benefits from that ambiguity. Rather than gathering the preceding elements into a triumphant finale, the piece opens them further. Kondo has more room to stretch phrases, while the band’s repetition produces a state somewhere between funk propulsion and ritual trance. Electric bass and drums maintain bodily momentum; keyboards, guitar and percussion complicate the edges; trumpet moves between declaration and raw sound. The track does not solve the album’s konton. It demonstrates that disorder can be sustained inside a disciplined form.
The production carries many recognizable signs of 1986: hard drum transients, bright digital textures, compressed bass and sharply delineated stereo space. Listeners resistant to Fairlight-era sound may find parts of “Sundown” and “YoYoYo” dated, while those approaching Kondo through free improvisation may consider the rhythmic structures restrictive. At just six tracks, the album also concentrates its methods so strongly that certain bass and drum patterns can seem overly insistent. The record offers little softness and no conventional ballad to release the accumulated pressure.
What prevents Konton from becoming a technological period piece is the quality of the ensemble’s physical interaction. Yamaki does not play like a drummer obediently following a program, Reck does not treat bass as neutral support, and Kondo never permits processing to erase the vulnerability of breath. Even Skopelitis’s Fairlight and Laswell’s studio construction are used to create resistance for the musicians rather than replace them. The album’s electronic world has enough solidity for the players to strike against it.
Within IMA’s development, Konton is the crucial hinge. Taihen introduced a broad collision of funk, folk memory, voices and avant-garde trumpet. Metal Position hardened that collision into new wave and industrial dance music. Konton retains the metallic rhythm but gives it greater depth, cultural reach and psychological darkness. The all-important partnership of Kondo, Togashi, Reck, Sakai and Yamaki is now clearly defined, and the pieces anticipate the expanded live force heard on Kamikaze Blow and the urban confrontations of Tokyo Rose.
The album’s chaos is therefore not a lack of form. It is the coexistence of several forms that refuse to become one. Korean percussion remains distinct from Fairlight programming; Laswell’s bass weight does not absorb Reck’s angular pulse; Kondo’s trumpet is amplified without ceasing to be breath. Konton finds IMA learning that a groove can hold all these contradictions without resolving them. The result is one of the group’s most compact and persuasive records: six pieces of disciplined disorder, beginning at sundown and continuing until the boundaries between ritual, machine, body and city have become impossible to maintain.

Larry Ochs - 2015 - The Fictive Five

 

Tzadik – TZ 4012  373.82MB FLAC

The first sound on Larry Ochs’ The Fictive Five is not an introduction so much as an opening image: tenor saxophone and trumpet arrive in a broad, sustained blaze while drums and two double basses begin altering the ground beneath them. The sound is immediately large, but it is not a conventional free-jazz assault. Individual details remain unusually clear. Bowed strings roughen the air, plucked notes appear like dark objects, Harris Eisenstadt’s drums redirect the ensemble without forcing it into a beat, and Nate Wooley’s trumpet changes from clean projection to grainy growl. The music generates the sensation of a landscape coming into focus while it is already moving.
Released by Tzadik in October 2015, The Fictive Five consists of three extended compositions and one brief intervening piece. “Similitude,” “By Any Other Name” and “Translucent” last between seventeen and twenty-five minutes; “A Marked Refraction” occupies just over four. Ochs designed the long works as “compositions for improvisers,” using coded charts, conventional notation and visual cues developed through decades with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. These are neither predetermined chamber pieces nor unstructured group improvisations. The written material establishes situations, tensions and possible directions, then leaves the musicians responsible for discovering how the music travels between them.
Ochs assembled an exceptional quintet for that purpose. He plays tenor and sopranino saxophones, joined by Wooley on trumpet, Pascal Niggenkemper on double bass and prepared bass, Ken Filiano on double bass and effects, and Eisenstadt on drums. The absence of piano, guitar or another chordal instrument is decisive. Harmony is implied through the interaction of five linear and textural voices rather than declared in blocks. The paired basses supply enormous depth, but they do not form a normal rhythm section. Filiano and Niggenkemper may reinforce one another, divide the register, exchange bowed and plucked attacks or produce sounds whose instrumental source is temporarily unclear.
The group first appeared during Ochs’ 2013 residency at The Stone in New York. The musicians were sufficiently excited by those performances to preserve the project, although Ochs’ Bay Area home and everyone’s schedules prevented them from reconvening until December 2014. The album was recorded immediately after that reunion at East Side Sound. This history helps explain the session’s mixture of familiarity and discovery. The players understand the compositions and trust one another, but the music has not been polished through years of repetition. It retains the tension of five people encountering possibilities that still feel new.
“Similitude,” dedicated to Wim Wenders, begins with nearly nine minutes of sustained horn intensity. Wooley’s trumpet is especially striking, projecting clear tones that acquire rough edges, vocal inflections and compressed bursts of noise. Ochs answers on tenor with a sound that is broad without becoming ponderous. The horns do not operate as soloist and accompanist; they create a shifting combined mass. Below them, Eisenstadt avoids treating volume as permission to batter the music indiscriminately. His playing is forceful but analytical, locating the exact accent that will change the direction of a phrase.
The piece eventually withdraws from its initial brightness, as if an imaginary camera were pulling back from the immediate action. This is central to Ochs’ conception of the album. Three compositions are dedicated to makers of images: Wenders, South African artist and animator William Kentridge, and filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. The pieces were not written to accompany specific films. Ochs instead imagined music capable of generating what he calls a movie in the listener’s mind. The dedications recognize different approaches to time, landscape and visual narrative without instructing the audience what to picture.
The Wenders association makes particular sense in “Similitude.” Its scale feels expansive and horizontal. Musical events suggest figures moving through large spaces, yet the piece maintains an emotional human presence within that openness. The two basses create changing horizons rather than a fixed foundation. Bowed tones stretch into the distance while pizzicato figures imply motion nearer the foreground. The music can sound fierce at close range and almost contemplative when heard as a complete arc. Its title proposes likeness rather than identity: one gesture resembles another, but every return occurs in altered light.
“A Marked Refraction” acts as more than an interlude. After the opener’s twenty-four-minute span, its compactness changes the listener’s sense of scale. Sounds appear as quick markings rather than parts of a vast landscape. The musicians seem to examine how a gesture changes when it passes through another player’s timbre: a bass scrape refracted through percussion, a clipped horn phrase redirected by silence. Its position also prevents the album’s three long works from becoming a continuous sequence of monuments. Ochs understands that duration acquires meaning through contrast. Four concentrated minutes can feel as open as twenty when the surrounding proportions are carefully controlled.
“By Any Other Name,” dedicated to Kentridge, begins in a dark register. Bowed basses groan beneath solemn horn statements, creating a space that feels subterranean without becoming static. Kentridge’s animated films frequently allow traces of erasure and revision to remain visible, and Ochs’ composition suggests a related process in sound. Ideas are stated, altered and partially rubbed away. The listener can still sense what existed before, even after a different instrumental combination occupies the foreground.
The middle of the piece is built from changing subsets. Duets and trios emerge from the quintet, creating a round-robin succession of perspectives: trumpet and drums, bowed bass against plucked bass, saxophone surrounded by sparse string noises. These passages do not resemble a conventional series of solos. Nobody steps forward to display an isolated identity while the others maintain accompaniment. Instead, the composition changes its population. Each temporary group reveals different properties within the same material, as though the larger scene were being examined from several positions.
Filiano and Niggenkemper are crucial to that effect. Filiano can produce a resonant, traditional bass body, but his use of effects expands the instrument beyond its acoustic outline. Niggenkemper’s preparations introduce clicks, rattles, scraped harmonics and metallic attacks. Together they sometimes sound like an enlarged composite instrument with too many strings and several conflicting resonating chambers. At other moments, their differences are sharply exposed. One provides pulse while the other creates friction; one descends into weight while the other removes any clear sense of pitch.
After its more fragmented exchanges, “By Any Other Name” regathers the ensemble into a fiery passage and returns toward the dark atmosphere from which it began. The symmetry is satisfying but not mechanical. The ending does not reproduce the opening; it reveals how far the original material has traveled. Ochs’ structures work because the musicians are not required to protect them. The composed frame can absorb interruption, contradiction and detour. Form becomes visible through change rather than obedience.
“Translucent,” dedicated to Kelly Reichardt, has the album’s most distinctive relationship with silence. It starts with short, tense saxophone phrases and equally concentrated drum responses, leaving white space around each exchange. Ochs’ use of the sopranino adds a narrower, more penetrating color than his tenor, but he resists filling the entire register with activity. Eisenstadt replies in forceful fragments, treating each drum sound as an independent shape. The effect is high-strung without being crowded.
As the basses and trumpet enter, the piece develops a quicker but still breathable flow. The title is exact: translucent material passes light while altering its clarity. Individual lines remain perceivable through the ensemble, yet none emerges completely untouched by the others. Wooley can make the trumpet sound brilliant, fragile or nearly airless, while the basses continually change the apparent density surrounding it. The final portion softens into an extended descent. Instead of ending with accumulated force, the music patiently comes in for a landing, making the album’s conclusion feel earned rather than imposed.
The recording and mix preserve the quintet’s physical dimensions. Marc Urselli recorded the session at East Side Sound in New York, while Myles Boisen mixed it at Headless Buddha Lab in Oakland. The basses possess weight without merging into an undifferentiated low-frequency cloud. Eisenstadt’s kit is present and detailed, and the horns retain breath, saliva, metal and room tone. That clarity is important because so much of the composition resides in changing instrumental relationships. If the sound were excessively reverberant or aggressively compressed, the music’s internal geography would disappear.
The album demands sustained attention. Its three long pieces do not provide conventional themes to memorize, and some transitions can initially feel episodic. The double-bass emphasis gives the record an unusually dark center of gravity, which may seem heavy across nearly seventy minutes. Listeners seeking constant explosive release will encounter long passages of restraint, while those attracted to chamber delicacy must accept sudden eruptions of raw horn sound. Yet these tensions are not symptoms of indecision. They are the conditions under which the album’s imagined narratives become possible.
The Fictive Five succeeds because Ochs’ structures neither suppress the players nor leave them responsible for inventing significance from nothing. The compositions provide invisible architecture; Wooley, Filiano, Niggenkemper and Eisenstadt continually redesign its interior. The resulting music possesses the unpredictability of improvisation and the large-scale memory of composition. Events that initially seem spontaneous acquire meaning when they return, fracture or cast shadows twenty minutes later. This is music to inhabit rather than decode: four landscapes with no prescribed images, waiting for the listener to close their eyes and begin seeing.

Lazro, Zingaro, Leandre, Lovens - 2002 - Madly You

 

Potlatch – P 102  271.78MB FLAC

Madly You begins without ceremony. Bowed violin and double bass immediately produce a web of high harmonics, dry friction and unstable resonance, while Paul Lovens places small percussion sounds around them with extraordinary care. Nothing resembles a count-in, theme or declaration of leadership. The four musicians seem to arrive inside a conversation that was already underway. When Daunik Lazro’s baritone saxophone enters, it does not simply add a lower melodic voice. It introduces breath, weight and animal-like vibration into a string environment whose pitches have already begun to lose their ordinary outlines.
Recorded live at the Forum de Blanc-Mesnil during the Banlieues Bleues festival on March 22, 2001, and issued by Potlatch in 2002, the CD contains two collective improvisations. “Madly You” lasts 40:47; “Lyou Mad,” its title playfully rearranging the same words, lasts 19:33. There are no short pieces, alternate takes or composed themes to provide orientation. The record presents one hour of real-time quartet invention, preserving not only its eruptions and discoveries but also the moments when the musicians test an idea, withdraw it or wait to discover who will move next.
The instrumentation is beautifully balanced despite containing no conventional harmonic instrument. Lazro plays alto and baritone saxophones, Carlos Alves “Zingaro” violin, Joëlle Léandre double bass and voice, and Lovens drums, percussion and musical saw. Every instrument can behave melodically, rhythmically or texturally. The baritone can provide a bass foundation but is equally capable of thin, whistling harmonics; the double bass can sustain pitch or become a wooden percussion body; the violin can sing or scratch; Lovens’ percussion can mark time or erase any clear sense that time is being divided regularly.
This refusal of assigned roles is the heart of the performance. Many free-improvised recordings advertise equality while still revolving around a dominant horn player. Madly You contains no such center. Lazro may emerge with a long baritone statement, but the strings can redirect its emotional meaning. Léandre may seize attention with a vocal cry, only for Lovens to answer with a tiny metallic sound that changes the scale of the entire event. Zingaro can produce enough intensity to resemble a second saxophone, then reduce his presence to a nearly inaudible filament.
Lazro’s baritone is especially compelling because he rejects the instrument’s familiar identities. He does not depend upon a swaggering low-register riff, nor does he treat the horn as an oversized vehicle for muscular free-jazz shouting. His sound can suggest a large animal in pain, a bank of oscillators, escaping air or a voice heard through thick walls. At points he moves rapidly through barely accented lines, making the baritone seem unexpectedly light. Elsewhere he allows a note to leak into the room as a hiss, creating tension through reduced volume rather than force.
The opening improvisation develops through changing alliances. Lazro’s deeper tones lock momentarily with Léandre’s bass, forming a dark composite voice whose components are difficult to separate. When he moves to alto, the relationship shifts upward: saxophone and Zingaro’s violin release a cage full of cries, whistles and sharp glissandi. These pairings never become permanent duos. Lovens listens for the instant when one relationship has become predictable, then inserts a cymbal scrape, drum stroke or loose metallic clatter that changes the conversation without dominating it.
Lovens’ kit sounds less like a single instrument than a collection of independent objects. His history in European improvised music taught him how to create momentum without maintaining a beat, but the playing here goes beyond tasteful nonmetric commentary. He can strike with considerable force when the music demands it. Just as importantly, he knows how to place one dry impact against a sustained string sound so that both become more vivid. Unattached cymbals and small percussion pieces produce noises that might initially be mistaken for electronic processing, though the performance is entirely acoustic.
The musical saw pushes that confusion further. In the second improvisation, its minute cracks, sliding pitches and disembodied whoops resemble computer-generated sound. The instrument’s vaudeville history adds a subtle absurdity: an old acoustic novelty produces some of the record’s most futuristic tones. This is characteristic of Madly You. The quartet does not seek newness through equipment. It discovers unfamiliar sounds by using ordinary acoustic materials with extreme attention and imagination.
Léandre’s double bass gives the music both gravity and provocation. She is capable of producing a full, resonant tone, but conventional beauty is only one item in a much larger vocabulary. Bow hair drags against strings, harmonics flare, pizzicato notes snap into the ensemble and the instrument’s body becomes a resonating chamber for physical attack. Her long history with Lazro is audible in their immediate understanding. They know how to reinforce one another’s low frequencies without turning the performance into a heavy monochrome mass.
Her voice makes the interaction more theatrical. Guttural cries, rolling syllables, groans and operatic projections enter without functioning as lyrics. These sounds can be funny, defiant or genuinely unsettling, and their meaning changes according to the responses around them. Zingaro may answer a vocal curve with a violin glissando; Lovens may puncture a grand gesture with a perfectly timed strike. The other musicians do not treat Léandre’s vocalizations as an expressive spectacle requiring passive support. They challenge, complicate and occasionally parody them.
Zingaro is the quartet’s most continuously mobile colorist. His violin can move between recognizable bowed tone and raw noise so gradually that the transition becomes impossible to locate. In the first piece, his interaction with Léandre creates an unusually broad string field. Because violin and bass occupy opposite ends of the family’s normal register, they can surround Lazro and Lovens, but both players continually escape those limits. Léandre reaches toward thin harmonics while Zingaro digs into coarse lower-string attacks. Their ranges overlap in the middle, where identities become uncertain.
The forty-minute title performance contains passages of considerable density, but it does not follow the standard free-improvisation arc of quiet opening, gradual crescendo, climax and exhausted conclusion. Intensity rises and disperses several times. A fierce collective passage may lead not to silence but to an intimate exchange between two players. A near-march briefly forms, giving the listener a glimpse of familiar rhythmic organization before the quartet takes it apart. Elsewhere, the four engage in collective skittering, each producing small quick sounds until individual gestures merge into a single restless surface.
This changing scale keeps the performance alive. The music can feel enormous when baritone, bowed bass and drums gather their weight, then suddenly shrink to the dimensions of a cymbal edge or a strand of horsehair crossing a violin string. The live recording preserves those contrasts with impressive clarity. Jean-Marc Foussat’s recording, mixing and editing allow the quiet details to remain audible without reducing the force of the loud passages. Audience presence is secondary; the room is heard primarily through the instruments’ resonance.
“Lyou Mad” does not operate as a leftover or abbreviated second set. Its shorter duration produces a different concentration. Lazro’s baritone is more immediately foregrounded, while Léandre and Zingaro move between stormy string textures and chamber-like exchanges. The players can sound more playful here because the first improvisation has already established the full range of their collective language. There is less need to demonstrate the space; they can begin rearranging its contents.
The musical saw contributes to that playful instability, but the piece never becomes whimsical. A gentle pulse may appear, with Léandre briefly suggesting walking bass against Lovens’ rhythmic figures, only to be deepened and disrupted. The quartet recognizes familiar musical behaviors without treating them as forbidden. Swing, march, chamber counterpoint and vocal theater can all appear for a few seconds. Freedom means being able to use those materials without becoming obligated to continue them.
An hour of continuous collective improvisation inevitably asks a great deal of the listener. The title piece contains stretches in which direction is intentionally uncertain, and anyone searching for recurring themes may experience parts of it as undifferentiated activity. The predominance of bowed strings, baritone multiphonics and metallic percussion also gives portions of the album a rough, gray tonal surface. Léandre’s vocal interjections can feel overly theatrical if heard outside the ensemble conversation.
Yet the record’s apparent disorder is supported by exceptional listening. These are musicians who understand that improvisation is not simply the unrestricted production of personal ideas. Every gesture proposes a relationship. The others may accept it, refuse it, exaggerate it or reveal a detail hidden inside it. Nobody needs to maintain authority, and nobody disappears into tasteful accompaniment. Even the silences feel collectively negotiated.
Madly You captures European free improvisation at its most communicative: neither subdued sound investigation nor indiscriminate eruption, but an acoustic social space capable of holding humor, violence, patience and surprise. Its two long performances continuously reverse expected roles and turn old instruments into sources of sounds without obvious ancestry. The altered second title, “Lyou Mad,” provides an apt summary of the quartet’s method. The same elements return in another order, and the rearrangement changes everything.

Macronympha - 2003 - Close To The Edge

 

Mother Savage Noise Productions – none  528.40MB FLAC

Close to the Edge presents Macronympha in its most effective format: one untitled, album-length block of sound with no track divisions to provide artificial relief. Issued in 2003 as a CDr through Solipsism, it is a characteristically obscure item even within the group’s enormous discography. The homemade medium suits the music. This is not noise polished into a prestige object or framed as an institutional electronic composition. It feels privately manufactured, physically circulated and intended to overwhelm whatever playback system receives it. Once started, the disc establishes a continuous environment of distorted metal, electrical pressure and unstable low-frequency motion.
The title inevitably recalls the 1972 Yes album, but Macronympha’s relationship with the long form is almost its inverse. There are no virtuoso solos, lyrical movements or carefully announced themes. The piece develops through density, texture and changes in pressure. Yet the joke is not entirely simple. Like a side-long progressive-rock composition, it asks to be heard as a complete duration rather than a sequence of interchangeable attacks. Its internal changes matter. A listener who hears only an undifferentiated wall misses the slow alterations in frequency, the appearance and disappearance of metallic bodies, and the way apparently static distortion continually changes its weight.
Macronympha was founded in Pittsburgh by Joseph Roemer and Rodger Stella at the beginning of the 1990s. Their signature method involved scrap metal, four-track tape, analogue electronics, effects pedals, overloaded recording levels and repeated acts of physical manipulation. That history remains audible on Close to the Edge, but the sound is not simply documentary industrial clanging. Metal is rarely allowed to remain an identifiable object. An impact enters a chain of distortion, is layered with other impacts and returns as a shuddering mass whose source might be a sheet of steel, damaged motor, shorted cable or collapsing piece of architecture.
The opening establishes a dense middle and lower register rather than attacking with a thin burst of treble. A broad rumble fills the field, already carrying several conflicting motions inside it. Some layers grind continuously; others strike, scrape or oscillate. High frequencies pass across the top like electrical arcs, but they are attached to substantial weight underneath. This balance is one reason Macronympha’s noise feels unusually physical. Volume alone does not create its force. The listener senses imagined mass: objects resisting pressure, surfaces dragging against one another and machinery working beyond its designed capacity.
There is no stable pulse, yet the material repeatedly approaches rhythm. Metallic impacts begin to recur at roughly similar intervals, only to be swallowed by distortion or displaced by another layer. A loop appears to form, but its edges have been damaged so severely that every repetition sounds different. This produces a kind of industrial lurch rather than a beat. The piece moves forward through momentum without becoming dance music, power electronics with a march tempo or the mechanically regular “rhythmic noise” that was prominent in the early 2000s.
Macronympha’s approach is frequently described as harsh noise wall, but Close to the Edge demonstrates why that term can be misleading when applied too rigidly. The sound is certainly wall-like in its refusal of silence and its near-continuous saturation. It does not, however, maintain one unchanging texture. The apparent wall is made of large unstable sections. One layer buckles, another moves forward, and a third disappears so gradually that its absence is recognized only after the overall color has changed. It is closer to watching an industrial fire move through a building than staring at a concrete surface.
The low end performs much of the compositional work. Deep electrical hum and distorted mechanical vibration create a foundation, but that foundation is never secure. It swells, clips and sometimes seems to pull the higher sounds downward. Headphones reveal overlapping bands of rumble rather than one bass drone. Through speakers, those same frequencies become architectural, interacting with the room and furniture. The piece changes according to playback volume because its bass is not merely heard; it modifies the listener’s physical surroundings.
Above that foundation, the high-frequency material is deliberately abrasive. Feedback tones flare without resolving into sustained pitches. Static breaks into hard grains, and thin squeals pass through the mix like stressed bearings. Macronympha avoids the common harsh-noise mistake of placing all frequencies at maximum intensity all the time. Treble may become dominant, but it does so against the memory of heavier passages. When a narrow band of piercing sound emerges from a broad roar, it feels sharper because the surrounding density has briefly changed shape.
The middle stretch is particularly effective at confusing foreground and background. A scrape that initially appears incidental may gradually become the most prominent element, while a heavy pulse recedes into haze. Sounds do not enter cleanly like instruments in a multitrack rock mix. They push through one another. This creates the impression that the recording itself is under stress, as if the tape, mixer and eventual CDr are not transparent carriers but additional materials being crushed alongside the metal.
That quality connects the release to Pittsburgh’s industrial geography without requiring a literal program. Macronympha’s earlier work often reflected the city’s deindustrialized landscape through amplified scrap and degraded recording technology. Close to the Edge does not need factory samples or documentary field recordings to evoke that environment. Its materials already carry histories of production, abandonment and reuse. Metal junk is not represented symbolically; it is given another working life as a source of sound.
The recording’s roughness is essential. Cleaner mastering might separate the layers more precisely, but it would also diminish the sense that they are contaminating one another. Distortion operates as both material and recording condition. When an impact clips, the resulting square-edged burst joins the original event. When several layers overload the available headroom, their collision produces a new composite texture. The piece is therefore not simply a performance captured imperfectly. The imperfections are part of the performance.
Macronympha’s noise is often distinguished from the rapid-cut style associated with some Japanese artists. Close to the Edge does not move by spraying hundreds of disconnected events across the stereo field. Its changes are slower, heavier and more cumulative. Instead of surprise through editing speed, it creates suspense by allowing a texture to continue until the listener begins noticing its internal instability. The question is not what sound will come next, but how long the present structure can endure before it deforms.
That method gives the piece an unusual relationship with time. Without track markers, the listener loses the normal means of measuring progress. The beginning does not present a theme, and the ending does not resolve one. Duration is felt through fatigue, adaptation and renewed attention. After prolonged exposure, the ear begins filtering the density and following small components: a dull recurring impact, a tremor in the bass or a narrow whistle buried behind the main distortion. When the balance changes, the entire field feels new even though its basic materials remain consistent.
The title becomes increasingly appropriate. The music remains close to an edge between motion and stasis, object and abstraction, control and collapse. It continually suggests that the next surge could become completely unmanageable, but Macronympha keeps enough control to preserve differentiation. Total chaos would actually be less intense. The sense of danger depends upon hearing structures form and then watching them fail.
There are no conventional vocals directing the emotional interpretation, and the absence benefits the piece. Macronympha’s imagery and surrounding aesthetic can be aggressively sexual, confrontational or antisocial, but Close to the Edge communicates primarily through material force. Its emotional character is not reducible to anger. There are passages of dread, grim humor, claustrophobia and even a severe kind of pleasure. The enjoyment comes from amplification revealing properties in ordinary discarded matter that polite sound would conceal.
The release is demanding even by noise standards. Its single-piece construction offers no convenient entry points, and sustained upper-frequency abrasion can become physically tiring. Listeners who require dramatic contrasts between quiet and loud may find its dynamic range narrow. At certain moments, the layers accumulate faster than the recording can meaningfully distinguish them, producing congestion rather than complexity. The modest CDr presentation also lacks the authority that a carefully manufactured LP or pressed CD might lend the material.
Yet that lack of authority is part of the appeal. Close to the Edge does not ask permission to belong to an established experimental canon. It arrives as an inexpensive underground CDr, containing one long action and little explanation. The listener must decide whether to enter it and how closely to listen. Beneath the initial brutality is a disciplined attention to weight, repetition and the transformation of physical objects through recording technology.
Macronympha’s best work makes harsh noise feel neither random nor overdesigned. The sound is organized, but its organization remains embodied and unstable. On Close to the Edge, scrap metal, feedback, bass pressure and tape-like saturation become components of a continuous structure that seems to be manufacturing and destroying itself at the same time. The piece never steps back to explain its process. It simply keeps pushing against the limits of its materials until the distinction between the object making the sound and the sound damaging the object disappears.

Von Einem - 2015 - The Von Einem Tapes 2xCD

 

Index Clean – IC-001  781.09MB FLAC

The Von Einem Tapes gathers seven cassettes recorded between 2011 and 2014 into a thirty-track, two-CD set lasting more than two hours. Such collections can expose every inconsistency accumulated across several years of small-edition releases, but this one feels remarkably unified. Mark Groves, the Australian musician behind Von Einem, had already established a narrow but surprisingly flexible vocabulary: processed speech, restrained industrial percussion, decaying electronics, low drones, metallic reverberations and sudden outbreaks of abrasive noise. Individual tapes may have been issued by different labels and created under slightly different circumstances, yet they appear to have originated inside the same sealed psychological environment. Mastered by Joe Talia, the compilation preserves their cassette-born roughness while giving the complete sequence enough continuity to function as something more substantial than a chronological clearinghouse.
Von Einem is named after Bevan Spencer von Einem, the only person convicted in connection with the group associated with Adelaide’s so-called Family murders. The project also draws upon other Australian crimes, psychological profiles and fragments of procedural language. That subject matter immediately creates an ethical problem. Naming a project after a convicted murderer risks directing fascination toward the offender, while the use of real cases can lend music an unearned appearance of seriousness. Groves generally avoids the theatrical aggression and domineering personality common to crime-fixated power electronics. His treated voice is clinical, flattened and often partially obscured, sounding closer to a damaged documentary narration than a performer assuming the identity of a killer. This distance does not resolve the problem completely, but it prevents the recordings from becoming straightforward exercises in murderer mythology.
The first disc is dominated by compressed scenes and abrupt pieces. “Silence and Brush Fences,” “Mummified Rather Than Dissolved,” “White Holden Sedan” and “Dirties” have titles that resemble isolated phrases extracted from police reports, local newspapers or inventories of evidence. The music behaves similarly. Sounds are presented as incomplete details rather than fully developed compositions: a pulse begins, a voice supplies several sentences, an electronic frequency shifts slightly, and then the piece ends before its implications become clear. Even the shortest tracks contribute to the cumulative pressure. They are not introductions to larger works so much as sealed rooms arranged along the same corridor.
Groves’ rhythms are especially effective because they rarely settle into conventional industrial momentum. The beats in “Dirties” and “Black Moods” thud rather than drive, repeating with the awkward regularity of machinery that has been repaired but not properly realigned. Synthesizer tones circle those impacts without releasing the tension they create. Elsewhere, junk-metal resonance, static and feedback occupy the foreground, although Von Einem seldom becomes a continuous wall of noise. Groves appears more interested in controlling empty space than overwhelming it. A sound can feel physically oppressive because of what has been removed around it: a lone impact echoes into silence, or a narrow frequency remains suspended after the voice has disappeared.
The processed narration gives the music much of its identity. Groves’ Australian accent remains audible beneath the treatments, grounding the work in a particular place rather than the anonymous dystopia inhabited by countless industrial projects. His delivery is calm to the point of emotional vacancy. It suggests someone reading a psychological assessment after every directly human response has been edited out. At its most effective, this method makes the listener conscious of how institutional language can convert suffering into a collection of dates, locations and behavioral patterns. At other moments, the recurring combination of impassive speech, low percussion and corrosive drone becomes predictable. Across thirty tracks, clinical detachment can harden into a formula.
The second disc opens the sound sufficiently to prevent that formula from consuming the collection. Distant, atonal piano appears in “Twice in the Head,” its notes sounding less composed than remembered from another room. “Forged Cheques” introduces an orchestral-string sample against crumbling drones and higher electronic squeals. These elements do not make the music lush; instead, they create brief suggestions of a wider emotional world that the prevailing numbness has suppressed. “Scripted Phases” places a fractured rhythmic framework beneath a windswept drone, while “Disturbed Then Refilled” returns to a thicker heavy-electronics pulse, a sustained midrange tone and a voice so altered that speech becomes another unstable texture.
This movement between recognizable detail and abstraction is crucial. The record is least convincing when its criminal references are expected to provide all the gravity. It is considerably stronger when the sound independently generates unease—when an object seems to be dragged beyond the microphone, when a rhythm falls out of alignment, or when a voice is reduced to consonants and electrical residue. The real cases should not function as decorative horror material, and the compilation occasionally comes uncomfortably close to allowing evocative titles to do work that the compositions have not earned. Yet its best pieces resist spectacle. They make violence feel bureaucratic, regional and concealed inside ordinary environments.
Vehicle references such as “White Holden Sedan” and “Orange Sigma” intensify that specifically Australian atmosphere. They are mundane objects, but their placement among descriptions of damaged bodies, forged documents and disturbed sites makes familiarity itself unsettling. The landscape implied by The Von Einem Tapes is not a gothic ruin or fantastical torture chamber. It is made from suburbs, roads, institutional interiors and quiet stretches of land. Groves’ “Thornbury Bunker” recordings repeatedly turn ordinary spaces into acoustic containers. The result is closer to forensic industrial music than horror soundtrack imitation.
The later portion of the set contains several longer pieces, including “A Group That Preyed on Itself,” “Hope Forest” and the concluding “Lower Light.” Here the tight miniatures begin to stretch into more patient environments. Sounds are permitted to deteriorate gradually, and the listener becomes aware of layers that would have been cut short on the earlier tracks. “Lower Light” is particularly well placed at the end. It does not offer a climax or explanation; it lets the compilation recede into a dimmer, less definite space. After so much processed information, the lack of resolution feels appropriate.
Talia’s mastering is essential to the success of this progression. The recordings retain differences in density and fidelity, as material sourced from seven independent cassette releases should, but changes in volume and texture do not make the compilation feel randomly assembled. The grain is preserved without allowing it to blur every piece into the same grey surface. The sequence also benefits from the alternation between one- or two-minute fragments and works lasting four, six or more minutes. Two uninterrupted hours of Von Einem’s restricted palette would be punishing in an unproductive way; the short pieces create exits, resets and changes of scale.
The six-panel wallet and accompanying booklet frame the release as a complete early-period statement, but the music remains more interesting than its packaging or scarcity. The Von Einem Tapes documents Groves learning how much he can remove from industrial noise while maintaining its physical menace. Its weaknesses are inseparable from that method: repetitions accumulate, voices sometimes lapse into generalized ominousness, and the invocation of actual crimes remains morally uneasy. Nevertheless, the compilation develops a distinct character through restraint, regional specificity and close attention to pacing. Rather than shouting its transgressions, Von Einem speaks quietly from inside a deteriorating mechanism. The listener is left to decide whether that voice is documenting the darkness, exploiting it or demonstrating how easily the two activities can become indistinguishable.

VA - (2008) Hated Perversions CD

 Institute Of Paraphilia Studies ‎– none

 Tracklist
1     –Nicole 12     Liquid Voyeur     3:39
2     –Nicole 12     Vogue Bambini     4:56
3     –Sick Seed     Agenda     3:07
4     –Sick Seed     Matronage     4:06
5     –Bizarre Uproar     Sieg Hail     8:07
6     –Eleczema     Ice Cold Enema     3:52
7     –Eleczema     Bob's Penis     4:11
8     –Grunt     Will To Do Damage     4:10
9     –Taint     Dedicated To Male Rape Group     5:35
10     –Dorchester Library     Incest Tales     2:38
11     –Control      Suffocate And Silent     7:01

Hated Perversions does not ease the listener into its world or disguise what it has been designed to do. Released by Freak Animal Records in 2008 as part of the label’s Institute of Paraphilia Studies series, the compilation brings together eleven exclusive pieces by Nicole 12, Sick Seed, Bizarre Uproar, Eleczema, Grunt, Taint, Dorchester Library and Control. The title establishes a deliberately repellent framework, while the original edition’s black, leather-like tall case and twenty-eight-page booklet turn the CD into something resembling a privately circulated case file. This is power electronics as confrontation, but the compilation is more varied than its imagery initially suggests. Behind the sexual pathology, poisoned language and acts of provocation lies an unusually strong survey of several different approaches to noise: whispered analogue minimalism, primitive rhythmic electronics, overloaded feedback, low-frequency pressure and long-form death-industrial escalation.
Freak Animal issued only 250 copies, yet the release was not presented as a modest homemade disc. Its elaborate construction gave it the physical authority of a prohibited document. Each participating artist received space within the booklet to interpret the subject, producing a catalogue of fantasies, taboos and deliberately objectionable images. The resulting package became more notorious than the audio and was eventually excluded from some online marketplaces. It is important, however, not to mistake controversy for achievement. Extreme imagery can create an instant reputation without requiring much artistic ability. The real test of Hated Perversions is whether the music generates its own disturbance after the booklet is closed. Much of it does. Its best selections make discomfort audible through pressure, repetition and damaged vocal presence rather than depending entirely upon their titles.
Nicole 12 opens the compilation with “Liquid Voyeur” and “Vogue Bambini.” The project’s analogue synthesizer tones are simple, close and oppressive, with little interest in conventional development. “Liquid Voyeur” combines an insistent electronic current with whispered vocals that seem to enter directly through the listener’s headphones. The track’s intimacy is more unpleasant than a barrage would have been. Instead of shouting from across a room, the voice behaves as though it has already invaded one’s personal space. “Vogue Bambini” is colder and less insinuating, replacing the first piece’s humid closeness with a more sterile arrangement of noise and processed speech. Together the tracks establish one of the collection’s central tensions: desire represented not as pleasure or release, but as obsessive attention stripped of ordinary human reciprocity.
That distinction matters because Hated Perversions continually moves between the suggestive and the physically brutal. Nicole 12 works through quiet fixation, whereas Sick Seed arrives with a rougher and more outwardly aggressive attack. “Agenda” and “Matronage” were the first officially released Sick Seed recordings, marking Pekka Perä-Takala’s transition from the harsh-noise project Gelsomina into a form better suited to structure, voice and psychological narrative. The sound remains corroded, but it no longer behaves like noise generated for its own sake. Buried rhythms give the distortion a forward pull, while the vocal performance supplies a recognizable human antagonist. The pieces seem organized around compulsion: sounds return not because they form a chorus, but because the music cannot stop revisiting them.
“Agenda” is comparatively direct, joining a tense electronic foundation to a voice that sounds both accusatory and trapped within its own fixation. “Matronage” is heavier and more contaminated, allowing layers to accumulate until the distinction between vocal distortion, amplifier damage and background movement becomes difficult to maintain. Sick Seed’s contribution points toward the project’s later ability to combine power electronics with more carefully paced industrial composition. Even here, at the beginning, the music has architecture. It does not merely turn everything upward and hope that volume will create meaning.
Bizarre Uproar’s “Sieg Hail” is a different kind of ugliness. The project has always understood that noise can become theatrical without becoming polished, using repetition, humiliation and damaged bodily presence to make a performance feel unstable. Here, the title’s warped spelling already turns a familiar fascist salute into something slurred and degraded. The track does not possess the clean, militant posture suggested by authoritarian imagery. Its noise is sickly, overdriven and physically unbalanced, with vocals pushing through a dense electrical surface that seems ready to collapse. Rather than presenting power as disciplined strength, Bizarre Uproar makes it sound diseased and compulsive.
That does not neutralize the symbolism or guarantee a critical interpretation. Power electronics often relies upon ambiguity, then leaves the audience to determine whether an image is being exposed, inhabited or simply used because it produces a reaction. Hated Perversions repeatedly occupies that unresolved space. Its aesthetic assumes that disgust is useful in itself, yet disgust does not automatically become insight. Bizarre Uproar succeeds primarily because the sound refuses heroic grandeur. Whatever domination is being enacted has already deteriorated into obsession, grime and loss of control.
Eleczema’s “Ice Cold Enema” and “Bob’s Penis” provide the compilation’s crudest change in tone. Compared with the tightly managed pressure surrounding them, these tracks feel more absurd, primitive and deliberately embarrassing. Their blunt titles strip away any pretense of refined transgression. The sound follows suit, using rough bursts, broken rhythmic gestures and an almost juvenile fixation upon the body. This grotesque humor is valuable to the sequence because an entire disc of solemn depravity would become unintentionally pompous. Eleczema punctures that seriousness, although the joke is less one of liberation than degradation. The body becomes ridiculous machinery: leaking, manipulated and deprived of dignity.
Grunt’s “Will to Do Damage” brings the compilation sharply back into focus. The title reads like a concise definition of power electronics, and the track avoids unnecessary ornament. It is built from forceful vocal declaration, grinding frequencies and a hard internal momentum that turns intention into action. Grunt’s sound is full but not shapeless; separate layers of distortion remain audible even when the track reaches maximum density. A lower mechanical body provides mass, abrasive midrange frequencies create motion, and the voice cuts across both. Instead of inviting the listener to examine an atmosphere, “Will to Do Damage” pushes forward with a single declared objective.
Mikko Aspa’s involvement in the label and multiple projects connected with the collection gives Hated Perversions a strongly Finnish center, but the international contributors keep it from becoming a Freak Animal family sampler. Taint’s “Dedicated to Male Rape Group” is especially significant as one of the final pieces issued under the Taint name before Keith Brewer continued developing related methods as Mania. The track contains recognizably Taint-like feedback squeals, low frequencies, agitated breathing and vocals that repeatedly disappear into the noise. It feels simultaneously controlled and feverish. Unlike Grunt’s frontal violence, Taint produces anxiety by making the listener wait for elements to return.
The breathing is particularly effective because it supplies the track with an unstable physical scale. It can be heard as exertion, panic, arousal or proximity to the microphone, and none of those possibilities is comfortable. High feedback traces narrow paths above the bass pressure while the vocal performance materializes only long enough to unsettle the balance. The result demonstrates why Taint remained so influential within American harsh noise and power electronics: Brewer could make a limited group of frequencies feel psychologically active. The sound does not simply occupy space. It watches, withdraws and approaches again.
Dorchester Library’s “Incest Tales” is a short collision of drums, feedback and disorder. Lasting less than three minutes, it behaves almost like an interruption between Taint’s tightly controlled unease and Control’s extended finale. Its brevity works in its favor. The piece does not develop far enough to establish the identity heard in the compilation’s strongest contributions, but its crude percussion creates a sudden physical commotion. After so many selections built around private obsession, “Incest Tales” resembles a room being violently disturbed. It is messy, immediate and gone before its limited materials become exhausting.
Control closes the disc with “Suffocate and Silent,” the compilation’s great long-form release of pressure. Thomas Garrison begins slowly, using dark sustained tones and spacious low-end movement to create a sense of confinement. The early minutes are patient enough to make each additional layer feel consequential. Frequencies gradually thicken, the available air seems to diminish, and the piece grows from a haunted industrial environment into a destructive mass. Where several preceding artists rely on immediate disgust or direct vocal aggression, Control earns intensity through duration. The final noise feels enormous because the listener has heard it being assembled.
This ending also reveals how intelligently the compilation is sequenced. It begins with Nicole 12 whispering at close range, passes through Sick Seed’s emerging structures, Bizarre Uproar’s diseased overload, Eleczema’s grotesque absurdity, Grunt’s concentrated attack and Taint’s anxious feedback, then allows Control to expand everything into a broad field of suffocating sound. The collection is not a continuous wall, nor is it merely eleven unrelated exclusives. Each project uses a different relationship between voice and noise. Sometimes speech commands the electronics; sometimes it is buried, fractured or reduced to breath. That changing hierarchy gives the CD a dramatic arc even when its lyrical preoccupations remain narrow.
The booklet complicates any attempt to separate sonic merit from sensationalism. Its visual material was intended to cross boundaries, but some representations do not remain harmless merely because they appear within an underground art context. The use of sexualized child imagery, even when digitally manipulated, raises concerns far beyond ordinary obscenity and helped make the release legally questionable in some jurisdictions. This cannot be dismissed with the familiar claim that all provocation is an examination of censorship. At points the package appears less interested in analyzing exploitation than in testing how close it can come to reproducing exploitative imagery while retaining the protection of “art.”
That uncertainty is part of the record’s history, but it should not be romanticized. The compilation demonstrates both the capabilities and limitations of transgressive noise. Its artists are skilled at generating coercion, claustrophobia and shame through sound, yet the conceptual framework frequently treats vulnerable people as raw material for somebody else’s confrontation. One can recognize the strength of Control’s construction, Taint’s frequency work or Sick Seed’s rhythmic development without pretending that every accompanying image gains depth through association with difficult music. Shock may open a door, but it cannot decide what lies on the other side.
Sixteen years after its release, Hated Perversions remains a severe and musically effective power-electronics compilation whose reputation is inseparable from a package that deliberately pursued exclusion. The audio survives closer scrutiny better than many controversy-driven records do. Its eight projects do not sound interchangeable, and the movement from invasive whispers to overwhelming industrial mass gives the disc an unusually coherent shape. “Will to Do Damage,” Taint’s contribution and “Suffocate and Silent” are particularly formidable, while Sick Seed’s debut captures a project discovering the possibilities of structure inside abrasion. The collection’s subject matter remains ethically compromised, sometimes analytically suggestive and sometimes merely ugly. That friction cannot be cleaned away—and cleaning it away would misrepresent the release. Hated Perversions is strongest when its noise exposes compulsion as cramped, repetitive and spiritually empty. It is weakest when forbidden imagery is allowed to substitute for the same hard work.