If you are a Fushitsusha or Keiji Haino fan, you already know to just forget what the title of this CD means -- you are never going to know unless you have a lot of familiarity with the early decades of the English language. If you aren't a fan, then who cares anyway? This Fushitsusha date was recorded live at the Victoriaville Festival in Quebec in 1997. Guitarist Haino and longtime bassist Yasushi Ozawa broke in then-new drummer Ikuro Takahashi. The set is just over an hour long and is broken up into eight selections that the mysterious Mr. Haino would likely call compositions. Since Fushitsusha never plays the same song twice, who's to say whether he's right or wrong? Without doubt, Fushitsusha is among the most powerfully emotive bands that has ever existed. The dynamic the band creates, especially in a live setting, is so far from most people's experience of "music" that it is almost unbearably unlistenable. But closer inspection reveals a profound musicality in the throes of the passionate noise and silence that pour forth from any performance, and this one was no exception. Micro- and overtonalities are established and executed through a precise use of feedback and an excessive use of volume. The set opens with This Is, an eight-minute feedback-drenched collage of echoplex guitar and furious rhythm section interplay. Once Haino establishes his path, his band members reach further to get ahead of him. Sometimes they succeed, other times he takes another route altogether. The crunch of those chords as they are crosscut with shimmering lines of feedback and Haino's unintelligible screaming in Japanese displaces the listener, provoking squirms. On Pathetique and Hazama, the mood is different. The guitar doesn't assault as much as it points. It's Haino's "singing" that's at the front here, and the rhythm section tries with great success to build a series of linking harmonic bridges for his voice to swing from and toward. Single lines of feedback dent the vast interior spaces of these tracks, but it's silence that reigns in the music.

1		This Is
2		Pathetique
3		Hazama
4		Precipitate
5		Small Laugh
6		Vertigo
7		Just a Piece Of
8		W 1/7

	Like us on Facebook
	@SoundHound	Follow