Oddly, I didn't really know anything about Jason Willett until recently, even though he spent a chunk of his recording career right down the road from us in Frederick, Maryland. A member of Half Japanese and an uber-prolific collaborator, Willett ran a label called Megaphone Unlimited that I found out about when I was doing some research on Ron Anderson and his myriad no-wave/punk outfits. It turns out that this Willett guy ran both the label and a record store in Frederick in the very early 90's, and even booked bands like the Boredoms and Dog Faced Hermans at his store. Finding out that the Boredoms played in a record store less than twenty minutes from where I was living as a teenager in the early 90's and I never knew about it makes me want to scream my head off, let me tell you. Anyways, Willett has had his hands deep in a bunch of projects and different bands over the years, most of them leaning towards a skronky, improv-heavy brand of art punk, and much of it was released on his Megaphone label throughout the past decade and a half. This new collection, issued by those freaks over at MT6 Records, is a perfect crash course in the music of Jason Willett in all of his different guises, allowing me to discover a huge chunk of local underground weirdness that somehow managed to elude me up till now. The Sounds Of Megaphone Unlimited is a collection of 20 tracks that span the years 1995-2007, taken from unreleased recordings from various Willett-related bands like Can Openers, Jaunties, Pleasant Livers, X-Ray Eyes, Attitude Robots, Dramatics, and one of his current projects, Leprechaun Catering. On various tracks, members from Half Japanese, Ruins, Boredoms, Gaybomb and other noisy outfits show up to contribute their talents, and it's a mixed bag of wacky casio pop experiments, spastic skronk-punk, free jazz, no wave, surf music, 60's soundtrack instrumentals, and noisy improvisation, all with nonsensical stream-of-consciousness lyrics and often whacked out cartoon-character vocals. No wonder I ended up finding out about this guy after digging around for info on Ron Anderson - Willet is almost like an East Coast counterpart to Ron's wonky genius, and shares a similiar penchant for extremely noisy freeform punk freakouts that takes the abrasive edge of no wave and puts this weird whimsical spin on it. Whether it's a honking cacophony of toys and malfunctioning drum machines or the awesome Dramatics track that has Yamatsuka Eye from Boredoms/Hanatarash/Naked City going absolutely apeshit over a nearly seven minute performance that starts off as hyperspastic hardcore thrash and ends up as this bizarre swinging cartoon soundtrack, this stuff is pretty nuts.