Sete Star Sept- Vinyl Collection 2010-2012

"I remembered a friend who'd died of a bad liver, and what he'd always said. Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again. It's hard to take, sure, but I feel sort of peaceful. Because it's always hurt ever since I was born." - Ryū Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue (1976)

If you thought explaining the appeal of grindcore to the uninitiated was a headache, try it with noisegrind some time: "Well, everyone tries to play as fast and as loudly as possible, like last time, only now everything's as shrill and as blown-out as possible and the recording quality is terrible. It's great!"

In struggling time and again to sheepishly explain why I love this garbage, I've stumbled into a rough sort of theory that comes close to defining exactly what it is that's so exciting about noisegrind, grindcore and extreme music in general.

Life seems to vibrate at a certain speed, and music in general is pleasant because it matches that vibration. Melodic music is pleasurable because it mimics elements of that vibration in simple, emotionally-resonant figures and recycles them in equally pleasurable variations. However, the beauty of extreme music is that it eschews the derivative qualities of melodic music and seeks to purely mimic the speed and intensity at which our lives operate. The inspiration for grindcore is all around us, just waiting to be tapped into.

That purity of focus is exactly what drives this record, a collection of Japanese bass-and-drums noisegrind band Sete Star Sept's vinyl output from the last two years.

A few months ago, I reviewed Sete Star Sept’s Revision of Noise LP (which, interestingly enough, continues to be one of the most popular sources of traffic to the blog). While the tracks on that record were certainly noisy, those songs were downright mannered compared to the violent, freeform output collected here. The tracks on this collection are of a splintered, grinding avant-noise character that makes it a for-noisegrind-heads-only affair, excepting grinders who enjoyed Revision of Noise and are willing to branch farther afield into a truly alienating space.

The sonic disconnect that traditionally occurs between material from multiple releases is softened by the fact that, while differences in approach and recording technique are evident upon repeat listens, everything is so mercilessly blown-out that nothing sounds incongruous or polished to the point of conspicuousness.

Still, the noisiest section of the collection is easily (and appropriately enough) the split with Noise. Sequenced from tracks 26 to 38, these songs are little more than bubbling geysers of drums, overlaid with a constantly vibrating and barely intelligible low-end and shot through with an occasional vein of vocals. While certainly not unlistenable as noisegrind music, it lacks the punch of much of the other music collected here, and is immediately upstaged by the release sequenced after it.

The split with Penis Geyser, which occupies tracks 39 to 46, contains some of the best material on the album. From the opening blast of "Big Issue," the sheer focus of these tracks is evident: no "exploding song structures," no improvisational hiccups, only sweet, aggressive grinding. While still wonderfully abrasive and dirty, it's mixed well enough that no elements bleed over onto any other, and the structures are tight to the point that the only feedback present is at the end of songs. Of all the releases collected here, this is the one that I most wish that I had picked up on vinyl, and a great starting point for those daunted by the massive volume of music on this collection.

Sete Star Sept are at their most unrestrained on the 50-song Gero Me EP, sequenced here from tracks 64 to 93. A number of these are specks of single-digit blipcore, and many of them have been bundled into omnibus tracks with anywhere from two to eight micro-eruptions contained in a single shot. Songs from Gero Me burst and re-form, splinter and fade, tumbling with the drums into buzzing masses that roll into one another. These songs especially carry with them a sense of free jazz experimentation, and make a case for noisegrind as an extreme music cousin of the improvisational free psychedelia of bands like Sunburned Hand of the Man and Jackie-O Motherfucker.

In many ways, this record sounds like a marriage of two of noisegrind's original classics, Sore Throat's Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid and Fear of God's Pneumatic Slaughter, delivered with a twisted avant character that counts coughs and feedback as elements as integral to the music as drums, bass and vocals.

As a 100-song, 76-minute noisegrind collection, Vinyl Collection 2010-2012 inevitably has its daunting moments, but those who delight in extreme music's experimental tendencies will find a lot to love here. Anyone with more noisegrind than one Gore Beyond Necropsy record in their music collections is going to need this.

Vinyl Collection 2010-2012 (FY40) can be ordered from Fuck Yoga. Sample tracks from the collection can be found on Soundcloud here, here and here, and some of the releases collected here, as well as other Sete Star Sept material, can be found on their Bandcamp.

Temporal Shift: Arsedestroyer- Teenass Revolt

The sheer power of words baffles me. The act of simply supplying a name or a description to a thing has the ability to provide form and purpose to a previously nebulous space, a sort of linguistic birth-giving that wholly alters the thing's existence as long as knowledge of that name or description exists. Perhaps due to this phenomenon, language-using humans tend to fear or simply ignore the nameless or the indescribable. That which is impossible to catalog then, in a sense, ceases to be.

Teenass Revolt, the noise-friendly LP from the Swedish grind madmen in Arsedestroyer, seems to suffer a similar fate when brought under scrutiny by many discerning grindcore fans. Spanning 38 untitled tracks, this utterly unhinged offering rarely receives any sort of attention, save the few diehard proponents that assure that its ugly aural legacy will live on (Beau from Insect Warfare constantly name-dropping it in interviews and on the band's blog is the primary reason I decided to give this album a chance in the first place.) The fact that the tracks offer little or no reference point, unless “that one with the weird Swedish dialog sample” counts, and few aesthetic or ideological cues save the package art, the band name and the album's title, means that the assimilation process for the record is rather unconventional, and may serve to drive off all but the most persistent listeners.

Musically, this is not entirely unfamiliar grindcore territory. One basic reference point could be Sore Throat's Disgrace to the Corpse of Sid, though this is nowhere near the unabashed mimicry of that record that's evidenced on something like Agoraphobic Nosebleed's Altered States of America; song and album structure is entirely the band's own, and there are no blipcore throwaways in attendance here. Arsedestroyer suture a more urgent and destructive tendency to that template, with the assault of Jon Chang's projects at their most lethal and the blown-out production of Rise Above's essential I Love to Relax LP.

Like many of my favorite extreme music offerings, Teenass conjures up its own unique atmosphere of foreboding during private listening. It sounds like the musical equivalent of a grainy foreign snuff/torture VHS, and the strange Swedish vocal samples (the sample which opens the album sounds like it could come from an intensely creepy Swedish rendition of a Three Stooges routine, and later in the album, the band even manages to make a sample of people mewling like cats sound deeply disturbing) add to the linguistic disorientation (provided that you're not fluent in Swedish, I suppose.) What could, in another context, come off as tired gore tropes, are rendered here in skewed and almost impossible to replicate fashion, making this record a solitary experience among years of grindcore achievements.

This album is a shining example of the argument for grindcore-as-aggregate; while individual tracks can more than hold their own, the album as a whole renders that unnecessary. Even lack of songtitles, taken in the long view, seems less of a stumbling-block than a means to highlight the sheer nihilistic beauty represented in Teenass Revolt.