A new vinyl-only release from the Japanese god of noise that's one of the heaviest things that I've heard from him in a long while! Released as part of the

recent limited series of fan 12"s that Noiseville has been putting out, Protean World is tough stuff, with two sidelong tracks that were recorded in Tokyo in 2008; the material features Merzbow mastermind Masami Akita once again adding live drums to his noise assault, but where previous percussive-heavy albums worked with heavy loops or propulsive prog-rock drumming buried deep beneath the dense layers of harsh noise, Protean World has Masami going berserk, industrial strength free-jazz style for nearly forty minutes, blazing through a wall of screeching high end feedback, crushing sheet metal textures, and a holocaust of oscillator fuckery while blasting on his drumkit with a frenzy of powerful fills, blastbeats, and even some thrashy speed that comes from out of nowhere. The recording quality is thick and LOUD but also murky and messy, with little of the detail of some of his other recent releases. This is pure aggression, one of the heaviest and most violent Merz albums I've heard in years, and sounds like a turbo-cyclone version of the improv-drumming/noise blasts on Merzbow's Annicca album on Cold Spring. Side one of this LP is the most over-the-top, with the relentless full-force drumming and non-stop cymbal chaos emulating a ten-car pileup at the center of the junkmetal maelstrom; it's what I would imagine you'd get if you paired up Ronald Shannon Jackson (Last Exit, Albert Ayler Quintet) with Incapacitants and let 'em battle it out for twenty minutes. The flipside starts off even more turbocharged, Masami blasting and rolling ferociously beneath a storm of sputtering, screaming electronic noise, but then halfway through he starts to slip into a vague sort of groove, a violent pounding industrial krautrock throb that hammers its way through flurries of squawking samples and grimy amp buzz. By the end of the side, it almost starts to sound like one of the really noisy pieces from blackened French hypno-creeps Aluk Todolo, or maybe a more frenzied and unhinged Aufgehoben jam, a pounding skull-crushing rhythmic assault that never lets up, that just continues to pile more screeching oscillator sweeps and demonic distorted noise and feedback on top of the punishing drum assault. Definitely a contender for one of the heaviest and most ferocious Merzbow albums ever! The record is on black vinyl, and is limited to seven hundred copies.