���Nothing Changes is the latest from sunglasses sportin' amplifier-shaman Keiji Haino and his legendary Japanese improv rock outfit Fushitsusha, a sprawling three-disc live album that documents an utterly monstrous psych ritual shot through with transcendent passages of dark ecstatic beauty and nightmarish discordance, recorded at a 1996 performance at Hosei University in Tokyo. And not just another Fushitsusha live set, but a collaboration with equally legendary German free-jazz saxophonist Peter Br�tzmann. It's a crusher. Over the course of these three hour-long discs, the black-clad group of stygian psych explorers (who also included bassist Yashusi Ozawa and drummer Jun Kosugi) move fluidly from expanses of minimal abstract percussion and eerie string scrape into full-on walls of skull-flattening free noise, as Haino's guitar erupts into thunderous gales of howling Hendrixian feedback and amplifier drone, and Brotzmann's sax is suffused into the mix. Everything flows together into a storm of amplified earth-shaking power, slipping from shrieking cacophony into warped off-kilter grooves as the rhythm section works out a halting, stop-start rhythm. Haino's dramatic howl drifts in around halfway through the first disc, reverb-drenched screams and shouts that manage to rise above the churning, rumbling feedback and noise, his ritualistic, intensely expressive delivery wandering through a fog of endless skronk and skree. At its loudest, this performance is as brutal and deafening as the most intense noise rock, the rhythmic section often locking into a huge, gluey hypnotic groove throughout the performance, everything else falling away for awhile as the drummer and bassist lay down a heavy, slow rock groove, the sound stripped down to just that huge sinister groove while Haino wails in the background, then suddenly the music will slip into some gorgeous, moody aching melodic jangle that tumbles out of the shadows.

��� The second disc drifts through clouds of clanging guitar noise and the slow warble of controlled feedback, starting off muted and mesmeric as minimal percussion slips across the band's hushed nocturnal ambience, slowly joined by sheets of dense wheezing drone and waves of metallic skree crashing across the soft black flutter of the guitar and cymbals. The sound slowly evolves into a strange dissonant symphony of cello-like scrape and thick didgeridoo buzz that swirls around Haino's ghostly, disembodied howls, his keening voice adrift across the billowing black sonic fog. When Brotzmann finally comes in with his first solo around the eighteen minute mark, it becomes a haunting expanse of moody freeform jazziness that eventually gives way to a grade-A freak-out, turning into a lurching spazztoid assault, a barking chaos that begins to border on Painkiller/Last Exit-esque territory. The final disc has some of the creepiest moments of the performance, passages of low, moaning sax and clanking metallic percussion that can for a moment almost suggest the otherworldly charnel ambience found in the classic film scores of Hikaru Hayashi and Michiaki Watanabe, later venturing out into long stretches of heavy-lidded riff-trance and whirling dronedrift, a lumbering freeform space rock dirge that transforms into a stomping, triumphant PSF-style meltdown that dominates the final moments of Fushitsusha's set.

��� Beautifully wrapped in an outer sleeve featuring artwork from Russian painter Denis Forkas Kostromitin (Dead Reptile Shrine, Horseback, Funerary Call, Grave Miasma), the three discs are enclosed in black sleeves held together by a black printed folder, and are accompanied by a printed three-panel insert that features liner notes by Wire writer / Japanese underground expert Alan Cummings (who was actually in attendance at this performance), and an additional insert that reproduces the original flyer advertising the show. Limited to one thousand copies.