A N P Live In Japan CD

This noise duo's name may sound German (in what is perhaps a tribute to their most obvious stylistic precursors, Einsturzende Neubauten), but Seijiro Murayama and Kazuyuki K. Null are about as non-Teutonic as you can get. Not that that matters -- skronk knows no nationality, and on this compilation of live tracks, all recorded in Osaka and Tokyo between February and December of 2003, Absolut Null Punkt creates a toneless clangor that would make any jackbooted industrial collective proud. Whether you consider that to be good news or bad is up to you, of course, but it's frankly difficult to imagine even the most tolerant noise freak getting his jollies on the first two tracks, both of which manage simultaneously to be deeply abrasive and utterly boring. Around the middle of the program things start to get a bit more interesting; on the third and fifth tracks (none have titles, only numbers) Murayama and Null generate relatively sophisticated rhythmic patterns and work with subtle tonalities to create music that is actually fairly approachable. But the final track is the payoff: at 21 minutes long, and given what's gone before, you'd expect it to be insufferable, but in fact it turns out to be a really pretty artful sound collage that comes across like a slightly more violent version of Fred Frith's famous "guitars on the table" experiments. Not bad. ~ Rick Anderson

Composer: K.K. Null.

A.N.P.: K.K. Null, Seijiro Murayama.

Personnel: K.K. Null (guitar, drums); Seijiro Murayama (drums).

Recording information: 2000V, Tokyo, Japan (02/09/2003-12/11/2003); Bears, Osaka, Japan (02/09/2003-12/11/2003); Binspark, Tokyo, Japan (02/09/2003-12/11/2003).

Unknown Contributor Role: Seijiro Murayama.