When it comes to the Japanese harsh noise underground, K2 reigns as one of the field's most ferocious sound-destroyers, forging a brutal "junk noise" aesthetic that employs spastic sound editing, psychedelic electronics and chaos strategies to create immensely abrasive and cathartic blasts of extreme noise-art. I'm such a big fan of K2 (aka Kimihide Kusafuka, who by day works as a cancer pathologist) and the brand of harsh noise that he's been perfecting since 1983 that we trawled his catalog for his most merciless recordings, and have come up with a stack of old and new releases that are all recommended listening for fans of maximum sonic chaos.

As synonymous as K2 is with sheer skull-rupturing electronic chaos, you can find some surprisingly beautiful creations within his extensive catalog of releases. One of those is Compressed Happiness, a collaborative album that came out a while back on Phage Tapes and which features K2 teaming up with fellow Japanese experimental musician Eiko Ishibashi, who has a number of solo albums of experimental jazz-pop on Drag City as well as another collab with Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins from a few years ago. I hadn't heard her music before picking this disc up, but from what I've checked out, her dreamy avant-pop is pretty far removed from the speaker-shredding harsh cut-up noise of K2. The end product is pretty spellbinding, a mixture of the expected harsh electronics and all manner of delicate, dreamy electronic melody, mixed in with swells of celestial synth, warbling looping drones, and other melodious elements that make for an enthralling combination.

Compressed features two twenty-minute compositions, with each artist utilizing raw sound materials provided by the other. On "Cold Pastoral", Ishibashi takes K2's synthesizers and recorded material and weaves a stunning, even lyrical noisescape filled with moments of both airy, unearthly beauty and punishing rhythmic chaos, at times akin to hearing classic Tangerine Dream drifting lazily through incandescent eruptions of brutal skree. And "Sweet Paranoia's Heaven Version 3" has K2 using some pre-recorded sound material from Ishibashi along with his own arsenal of junk electronics and mangled instruments, producing another of his trademark maelstroms of hyper-abrasive, violently psychedelic noise collage, flecked with traces of modern classical piano and spacey electronic effluvia. Easily one of my favorite K2 collaborations.