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.

In stark contrast to the delicate traditional Japanese ink / brush artwork that adorns the front and back cover of Tamayura, this 2012 album from Japanese junk-noise master Kimihide Kusafuka features an hour of non-stop apocalyptic garble, presented in his trademarked high-speed cut-up style. The first track "Tamayura Hi-Fi Blues" stretches on for more than half an hour alone, showcasing K2's rapid-fire noise collage in grand form. Here Kusafuka employs a combination of hijacked consumer electronics (including a Nintendo DS), contact mics, "junk electronics", and Korg synth to produce his brutal blasting noise, which he then cuts up and re-arranges into epics of spastic digital vomit. A savage, jubilant chaos, a constantly changing/shifting/mutating field of burbling glitch and screaming feedback, teeming with violent whiplash-inducing signal-fluctuation, blasts of brutal electronic effects, piercing high-end drones and waves of metallic shimmer; lurching machinelike rhythms rattle around in the depths, before being overtaken by swarms of gibbering, insectile shrieks.

So much of this resembles the sound of cyborg warfare taking place inside of an ancient 8-bit videogame system, while others suggest vast computerized intelligences screaming idiotically into the void. What you will not find are any moments of calm or reflection. It's a total brain-rape, an overwhelming blast of inhuman sound, but there's an almost insectile logic to how Kusafuka arranges all of this mayhem. If you're already a fan of K2's brand of brutally psychedelic noise, you already know what to expect from this. And it certainly delivers.