Eat Bit by SPORE SPAWN

released August 21, 2013

Uncompromising noise in various guises, from unrelentingly harsh to meditative or the other way round. The minimal pulsing of a buzzer set against a backdrop of hiss in the opening track can make you drift away like the lushest of ambient music, while the fierce materiality of “Four AA Batteries Massacre” hits you square in the face. But after the initial shock, the near-white noise becomes almost soothing: This is sound that doesn’t care about feelings, humans, nature, the earth. This is static from outer space, and whatever your problem is: This sound exists completely independent from all of that.

Japanese “harsh noise gamer” Spore Spawn impressively shows that even within the boundary of harsh noise, quite a variety of angles and nuances can be explored. Spore Spawn describes his instruments as “Noise, Voice, Game, Beer”, and the same materialism is at work in “Four AA Batteries Massacre” when we actually hear the batteries being inserted and taken out of his sound devices. With this seemingly blunt gesture, this sound really goes where noise is supposed to go: to the outer realms of the audible, where noise becomes silence (when you take out the batteries!) and physics becomes metaphysics (or vice versa). Therefore, this is really great extreme music because it is all about sound, with none of the ‘extremist’ gestures and images that all-too-often serve to inforce clichéd ideas of transgression in the noise field.

File under: Noise