For his 13th album this year, on top of multiple mixes, a remaster and a collaboration project, Merzbow continues to make the listener nostalgic for CT scans. When listening to this album, you don’t feel like he’s able to release so much music because it’s zero-effort, zero-talent. You feel as if you’re back in the good old days when doctors would seat you on a cold, white brick of a table, shove you into a hole with restricted movement and then tell you you have a malignant brain tumor.



As per most harsh noise records, Merzbow delivers only the finest sound collages that emotionally invest the listener with the act of putting a screw under their toenail and kicking a wall. The musical equivalent to a Jackson Pollock painting if Pollock ran out of paint and began using his ejaculate knowing his admirers would buy anything he produced, Merzbow isn’t over-saturating anything for his fanbase of masochists. He’s just a misunderstood genius.



It is somewhat disappointing that this project was a bit more mainstream than albums 1-12, but maybe he can turn it around somewhere within the next 30 LPs he releases this year. Instead of the rattling teeth and sharp, shooting pains going up my spine that Noise Mass gave me, I want Merzbow’s music to pierce my frontal lobe and give me a classic lobotomy all while suturing up the stab wounds to my torso. Sadly, I couldn’t rate this album like I do with most of my reviews because harsh noise is just too sophisticated and nuanced for my scale. This is perfect music to relax and sip some razor-filled tea to (with your pinky raised of course, that way the music plebeians know you’re better than them).