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.

Sporting an album design by J. Randall from Agoraphobic Nosebleed, 2012's Land Of Volcano once again sees K2 assaulting the listener with more of his long-form explosions of brutal cut-up electronic chaos, continuing to eschew the use of computers, MIDI and acoustic noise in the creation of this stuff. As usual with K2's albums, it's focused on just a couple of tracks, but they tend to run long; this has four epic-length tracks of crushing psychedelic noise, with titles like "For Earthnoid", "Purple Smoke Deep Water" and "The Volcano" all evoking images of geologic violence. Each track is a sprawling cacophony of violently manipulated and tortured feedback (which sometimes veers into truly extreme levels of piercing, high-frequency ear-hate), swathes of swooping spacey synth-noise and blasts of garbled electronic horror, the grinding and sputtering of malevolent engines blanketed by layers of howling Hawkwindian synthblurt, the whole thing cumulatively coming together as a shrieking, yowling mass of terrifying noise that comes spilling out of the speakers in rapid-fire ejaculations of chopped-up, abruptly edited chaos. It's pretty much along the exact same lines as most of K2's harsher work, but if you're a fan of that stuff, it's exactly what you're looking for. Total psychedelic destruction.