OK, so I just wrote up Experience The Concreteness from C.C.C.C. side-project South Saturn Delta for last month's New Additions list, and went on and on at length how that was an even more brutal manifestation of the space-noise overdrive of C.C.C.C., Hiroshi Hasegawa's churning synthesizer furnace amplified into even more ear shredding levels of cosmic blast. Well, after listening to the latest C.C.C.C. album this past week, I'm thinking that I might need to eat my words - on Chaos Is The Cosmos, the prestigious Japanese noise cult returns with their first new album since 1996's Flash and it's as skull-shreddingly intense and crushing as any Japanese noise album I've heard in the past decade. Focal members Hiroshi Hasegawa (also of Astro, YBO2, South Saturn Delta) and wife Mayuko Hino (a former bondage-porn actress) are joined by Fumio Kosakai (Hijokaidan, Incapacitants) and Ryuichi Nagakubo (Tangerine Dream Syndicate) for a single 43-minute track that was recorded live in the mid-1990's, and the experience of being subjugated to C.C.C.C.'s brutal psychedelic overload hasn't lost an iota of it's power in the past ten years.

The group begins in the red. The sound is already fully formed as soon as you hit "play" - a gigantic maelstrom of screaming guitar noise writhing with deafening synthesizers and electronics sweeps over you, drowning you in layer upon layer of Hawkwind-like space effects, roaring subsonic drones, buzzing synthesizers, sickening synthesizer squelches that burst forth like alien saxophones squonking across the cosmos, squalls of tortured psych-guitar that scream and screech and scrape, melodic guitar solos that suddenly morph into demonic atonal nightmares, brutal klaxon blasts and cement-mixer grind. Where artists like Merzbow and Masonna and Incapacitants seek to destroy through high-end skree and abrasive white noise, C.C.C.C. forges a constantly changing vortex of loud, freaked-out improvisation that takes on mind-altering qualities. Towards the middle, the noisescape takes a terrifying turn as weird electronic blastbeat rhythms and Mayuko Hino's vocals enter the picture, and she moves from sections of distressed, panicky spoken word to jarring screams of fear and hysteria that tear through the storm of mega-effects. This only lasts for a few minutes though, and the last half of the track returns fully to the roiling cosmic noise.

This is a top notch release, one of the strongest from the old guard of Japanese noise I've heard in ages - C.C.C.C. fans have been waiting for ages for something new, and this definitely doesn't disappoint. Highly recommended to anyone into brutal psychedelic space noise.