When I think of musical collaborations, silly me, I tend to have my head naively stuck in an age prior to the popularization of personal computers; as in, I often think artists necessarily have to be within close proximity to one another in order to actually collaborate. Obviously, presently, that’s not at all the case, and it’s easy to imagine (and probably recall) albums being crafted in unison thousands of miles apart, as well as rappers choking their producers via a creative series of emoticons. Still, it’s probably more common for collaborations to at least start out in person.
The Tokyo venue 20000 Volts was the initial meeting place for British multidisciplinary artist Russell Haswell (who’s previously collaborated with the likes of Aphex Twin, Peter Rehberg, and Florian Hecker) and Pain Jerk a.k.a. Gomi Kōhei, whose prolificacy in the genre of dynamic Japanese noise has been more or less ongoing since the early 90s. They met there in 1997, swooned over their mutual ability to remove frequencies from the human auditory system, and vowed to collaborate at some point in the future. It wasn’t until 2012, when they performed together at the Rammel Club in Nottingham, UK, that things started progressing toward something special.
The other kind of special. No, the other kind of special. No, the psychopathic kind of special. Two years in the making, Electroacoustic Sludge Dither Transformation Smear Grind Decomposition nO!se File Exchange Mega Edit (due out June 9 on Editions Mego) is the result of their Nottingham performance + solo recordings, subjected to an obscene amount of edits and re-edits that were sent back and forth between the two. Thank the heavens for our evolved inbox storage capacities! And leave purity to the devout. Have a listen to one perennially fucked-with excerpt off the double album below. I’m not sure how much more convincing you need:
Electroacoustic Sludge Dither Transformation Smear Grind Decomposition nO!se File Exchange Mega Edit tracklisting:
01. Russell Haswell’s Mega Edit
02. PAIN JERK’s Mega Edit
• Russell Haswell: http://haswellstudio.com
• Pain Jerk: http://painjerk.blogspot.com
• Editions Mego: http://editionsmego.com
More about: Pain Jerk, Russell Haswell
