I still can't believe that we found these...C.S.S.O. is one of my favorite Japanese grind bands, period, and this live LP from the band is a total freakout that captures them at the absolute height of their mind-expanding, acid-grind powers. C.S.S.O., or Clotted Symmetric Sexual Organ, are hands down one of the weirdest grind bands to ever come out of Japan; they started off in the early 90's as a raw but competant Earache Records influenced grind/crust outfit who took their inspiration from bands like Napalm Death and Carcass, they later underwent a bizarre transformation into a kind of psychedelic, dope-damaged mixture of old school grind, ultra-noisy garage rock, and far out, fx-overloaded psychedelia. If you want to have your senses blasted by something from another dimension, check out C.S.S.O.'s Are You Excrements? full length-it's a fucking brainwaster, one of my top ten weirdo grind albums. Imagine Napalm Death from the Scum era pod-fused with the MC5 and Jimi Hendrix after he'd been covertly infected with rabies. Brutal blasting low-fi grind mashed with insane wah-wah splattered solos, trippy theremin fuckery, mangled but deceptively catchy garage rock hooks buried under a mountain of broken fuzzboxes, blastbeats, and noise.

The band released this live LP in 2000 on the short lived label Riot City Japan, an offshoot of Riotous Assembly Records. The label folded not long after, but even by then this record had gone out of print; we had carried it back in our pre-website days in the Crucial Blast travelling record shop, but it's been at least seven years since we had a copy for sale. So I was pleasantly surprised when one of our customers contacted us recently and offered to sell us a stash of C.S.S.O.'s Live that he had left over, I guess from an old distro or something. Whatever the case, we grabbed 'em and we've got this slab of fierce, fucked up psychgrind on both black and blue colored vinyl. Nineteen tracks of the bands grindier material recorded in 1996, but loaded with crazed theremin/electronic noise, nuclear strength blasts of ultradistorted grind, raging punk and brief moments of brutal over the top improvisation that sounds like a Japanese free-rock band being fed straight into the roaring turbine of a jet engine on an Airbus A380, all recorded in Kyoto in 1998, Tokyo in 1997, and somewhere in Germany in 1996.