Thursday, March 24, 2011

JAZKAMER "THE MONROE DOCTRINE" (Pica Disk)

Jazkamer turns in another raucous blast of total devastation, complete free noise/spastic jazz mutation rock primalism as seen through a shattered rock prism. All the colors of the noise rainbow are on full display-grey, white, black, black and fucking black. This is a fallout, everything completely breaking down into one big gross pile of kit-shattering drum aggression and guitar/tape demolition. Similar in range and intent to the record i reviewed last month, "We Want Epic Drama", "The Monroe Doctrine" starts off in the red and wired for explosion and just goes from there. It's a wash of hell, a blood-spattered cloud of sonic violence splashed across the street. Hegre's guitar whines and spits and screams while Marhaug's tape and synth antics reduce everything even resembling a sound molecule into flatulent, wasted tones of disease and extremism. This shit is flying completely off the rails at a million miles per hour, like hailstones of razor and shrapnel. Again the major touchstone here is Merzbow's "Bird" series, especially since this record too has some serious free-jazz by way of metal drumming going on the whole way through. Your skull may as well be getting smashed repeatedly against a wall. But whereas Merzbow is prone to extended blasts of near never-ending audio horror, Jazkamer reign it in and give us a relatively digestible thirty minutes on "The Monroe Doctrine," allowing for the sensitive listener's ear to bear only so much incredible rage at once. To me this sort of music isn't too far removed from the more outer fringes of free improv, with John Zorn's various projects most quickly coming to mind but also comparable to Sonny Sharrock or the Brotzmanns (both Peter and Caspar.) There's an attitude of "fuck everything" here that i particularly like-it isn't as wholly nihilistic as black metal but there's a definite sense of rebellion present in all the squall, another notion of challenge buried somewhere deep in all the noise. This is one of the best of Jazkamer's 2010 series and well worth your seeking it out. Total free noise rock-referencing annihilation, dangerous ideas for dnagerous musical minds. It's a fucking shredfest-get this one now.

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