Merzbow - Dharma CD

 Noise King Merzbow returns...
Japanese noise maestro Merzbow strikes again with “Dharma,” the latest pummeling release in a legendary twenty-year underground noise career. This latest effort from sole composer Masami Akita treads familiar ground, but there are moments on this album that are certainly noteworthy, as it seems Merzbow always has something new up his sleeve. “Dharma” is nearly fifty minutes of the earsplitting and aggressive compositions for which Merzbow is known and renowned: repetitive loops, intense squeals, the omnipresent flood of static, the lengthy streams of shrill feedback, and intermittent bursts of distortion. “I’m coming to the garden…. no Sound, no memory” begins the CD with rare subtlety, a metallic drone that adeptly phases into invigorating frenzied clamor. The relatively short piece “akashiman” follows, which melds into the next track, and highlight of the album, "piano space for marimo kitty." Here Merzbow manipulates already out-of-tune piano keying into a nearly eight minute distorted masterwork of sound tweaking. The final track is a relentlessly looping thirty-minute tour de force that barrages the listener with mesmerizing, extended torrents of static while maintaining varied underlying noise rhythms. “Dharma” comes in an attractive minimalist-white cardboard digipack. The digipack folds out three times to display an interior design of bright and swirling liquid colors, along with basic CD information (song titles and album credits). Mesmerizing and exquisite, "Dharma" is of course recommended to the Merzbow fan. It is also a recommendation to anyone with curiosity about musical experimentation and sound manipulation. Of course, it is helpful to have a tolerance for the crushing extreme noise of the Merzbow variety. Merzbow has always been unique and thoroughly creative, and with "Dharma," Merzbow shows he is still the master of the noise/experimental musical genre.
Submitted by a reviewer (New York, NY) 
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