All hail the trans-Pacific noise continuum! Each 21-minute side of this album is dedicated to an artist from Japan and California, respectively. While certainly harsh, the music of K2 aka Kimihide Kusafuka and Allan Zane offers a great richness of detail, which makes it less of a harsh noise wall than a noise mosaic. Making perfect sense of the Split LP idea, each artist offers a different take on what it means to make noise: while Japanoise guru K2 maxes out anything there is on his electronic equipment, Allan Zane takes to his power tools.
“Mirror for Colored Sin” by K2 credits junk electronics as sound sources next to the legendary TR-808 drum machine. There is a wonderful irony in the fact that the famed 1980s device, adored by pop and techno producers the world over, is used here for something so decidedly un-pop and undanceable. After all, isn’t noise about destroying the official signal and creating something from the remains? Aptly, Kimihide Kusafuka credits himself as “decomposer” of the piece he performs on this record.
Allan Zane dedicates his piece “Zerstörte Musik” to two of the most iconic noise practitioners outside of Japan: GX Jupitter-Larsen of The Haters and Richard Rupenus of The New Blockaders. Using metal objects, power tools, effects devices, and a good amount of overdrive on the recording, Allan Zane creates a piece that does not sound simply like ‘destroyed music’ as the title claims, but quite psychedelic in its textural, ambient quality. We would not go as far as calling it ‘acid noise,’ but Zane’s years of experience in creating spaced-out audio collages with LSD (that is, his recording project Le Scrambled Debutante, also released on attenuation circuit) sure benefitted this track a great deal.
