Oh man, finally! Part of Willowtip's righteous Discordance Axis reissue campaign, which will hopefully expand to cover the entire output from this band. We've been needing this for years, as the entire discography from these avant-garde grindcore gods has gone out of print and has been pretty hard to get your hands on, even used copies; the Jouhou CD itself has been gone for more than a decade. This 2023 CD reissue for the second album Jouhou (which originally came out all the way back in 1997 on the defunct Japanese label Devour) is definitely one of the essentials, featuring the original track list as it was on both the original and the later Hydra Head redux (titled 2. Perfect Collection. Jouhou), and is presented in the same DVD-box package design and thick booklet as that second release. Merging ultra-violent, insanely spastic and complex grindcore with sophisticated graphic design, obsessive typography, and video game / science fiction / anime aesthetics, these guys really stuck out in the 1990s with this shit, and I don't think it would be too excessive to say that their interpretation of grindcore would turn out to be huigely influential on grind bands that followed. This wasn't the death metal-fueled heaviosity of the O.G. legends Napalm Death and Brutal Truth, but rather something much more "twitchy", anxiety-induced (and inducing), and texturally experimental. Revisiting the core Jouhou album tracks now in '23 with some hindsight proves that to the case.

For years, this had been one of the most sought-after grindcore releases of the 90s, with long gaps between its availability. Along with their masterpiece The Inalienable Dreamless from 2000 (also recently reissued by Willowtip), the band erupts like an uncaged rabid animal, the trio issuing ultra-violent volleys of pure grindcore with a unique angular riffing style, heavy use of discordant chord progressions, incredibly tight and intricate blastbeats and swirling drum patterns, and crazed vocal performances that run the scale of human throat extremity from monstrous guttural bellowing to insanely frantic, ear-piercing shrieks. The songs on Jouhou are tightly constructed and compact, averaging around a minute in length, but it's incredible how much complexity and texture and rhythmic chaos is woven into each song. It's controlled chaos, from the caustic heaviness of "Carcass Lottery" to the razorwire speedfreak hardcore of "Come Apart Together, Come Together Alone", to the bizarrely catchy nuclear skronk and stop-start precision of "Typeface", the clanging harsh noise of their Merzbow collaboration "Nikola Tesla", and the sputtering hypno-blast of "Flow My Tears The Policeman Said" (kudos, as always, to the Philip K. Dick reference). It's a study in contrasts, and in extremes; each musician operates at the apex point of their athletic ability. Dave Witte's whirlwind laser-cutting drumming instantly became a thing of legend, while guitarist Rob Marton executes some of the craziest hyperspeed riffing and scouring noise that I've ever heard on a grind album, period. And Jon Chang's electrocuted-ape vocals remain as harrowing to hear now as they did nearly thirty years ago. Jesus christ. It's really amazing to listen to that original twenty-song outburst again after all of these years, seeing how the eighteen-minute experience of Jouhou permanently impacted the aesthetic of grindcore. It's so harsh, atonal at times, and utterly vicious and forward-thinking, this album is to grindcore what Gorguts' Obscura is to death metal: a paradigm shifter. Beyond grind, this album stands as one of the most important and destructive "extreme music" records of that decade.

The five songs from the split 7" with Plutocracy (released on the iconic powerviolence label Slap A Ham) are from the previous year, recorded in 1995, and aside from an earlier version of "Flow My Tears", are all exclusive to that split ("Alzheimer", "Eye Gag", "Area Trinity", "Integer"). . The rougher production does nothing to soften the pointilist violence that careens off this platter. Same for the six songs from the split with Melt Banana that appeared that same year on HG Fact ("Information Sniper", "Amphetamine Hollow Tip", "Tokyo", "So Unfilial Rule", "Junk Utopia", "Continuity"), steeped in a kind of cyberpunk nihilism; an interesting preamble to Witte joining the Banana crew on drums briefly in the early 2000s.. And the final track, an untitled live recording captured at a Tokyo performance in 1998, is a kind of Cage-ian audio prank on the listener, teasing the band's encore for a bit before emptying into a nearly half-hour recording of room / crowd ambience as the audience gradually leaves the venue. No one else was fucking with the expectations of grindcore fans like that. Not then. Not now, really. This marks the period where Discordance Axis was leaving their noisecore roots behind and truly venturing into new, unconventional territory.

The new vinyl edition presents the album cut at 45 rpm for the first time, for improved audio fidelity, and also comes with some new artwork from Chang, along with the same DVD-size booklet as the CD version.