It can be difficult to rate one Japanese noise album against another, but Noisextra will continue to get my vote for one of the most extreme,

challenging releases in the canon. Released in 1995 as part of RRRecord's legendary Pure series, Noisextra is one of the more freeform

releases from Japanese extreme noise artist Masonna, aka Maso Yamazaki. Active since 1987, Masonna is one of the more well known figures in the harsh noise

scene from his releases on Relapse/Release in the '90's, as well as being one of the few artists to have actually toured the U.S. in any real capacity.

Everything that he's released is pretty extreme, but Noisextra is a real skull-exploder. The original CD version has been out of print for awhile,

but Ron at RRR just reissued it on CD-R and keeping the same style of chopped up, xerox-damaged packaging. The album is made up of two tracks - the 15 minute

"Reclaimed Articles" where Masonna edits fragments of recordings taken from five different albums and pastes everything back together into a hyperviolent

collage of screaming, harsh blats of feedback and pedal screech, and chunky rhythms tightly edited together and flying by at lightspeed into super ADD

afflicted electronic noisecore destruction. The second track, "Acid Sky", is almost half an hour of ego-destroying psychedelic white noise sculpted into a

crushing, ever-shifting wall of crushing hiss and distortion, and it's an intensely suffocating experience up there with Merzbow's Venereology and

Stalagggh's blacknoise experiments.