Sun Ra and Merzbow- Strange City ALBUM REVIEW

Japanese Skrillex did an album with le experimental space jazz man. Whoop-de-fuckin-do. And of course it’s a double album because--true to both of the artists’ habits--each movement goes on far longer than anyone outside of pretentious nu-males looking for an obscurity wankfest has the patience for. The two seem like an odd pairing, but I guess it’s really not such an unreasonable collaboration once you realize that harsh noise and freestyle jazz are pretty much the same thing, i.e., both genres favor masturbatory noodling over any kind of real musical direction. And given that Merzbow has teamed up with pretty much everyone from Mike Patton to Sonic Youth, it was perhaps only a matter of time before this dynamic duo came together.

Sun Ra is a bit of an unlikely candidate for any kind of collaboration--mostly because he’s dead. I assume, then, that this album is mostly Merzbow’s remixes of some recently unearthed Sun Ra bootlegs or some shit. Ra is mostly notable for his absurd claims that he was an alien from Saturn. Born Herman Blount, Ra renounced his former identity some time in the mid-30s after he’d had an existential vision while meditating. In his vision, he spoke with some aliens native to Saturn, who explained to him that the world was going to shit and he had to drop out of college to make music and spread his message of peace. From then on until his death, he would deny any connection to his former identity, and called himself Ra, because he was obsessed with Egyptian Pharaohs for some reason. Cool dude.

Merzbow’s story isn’t quite as surreal--he’s just some guy who really likes fucking with electronics. He’s generally considered to be the “Beatles” of harsh noise in the sense that anyone even passively interested in noise music knows his name. The dude has dropped almost 250 studio albums since 1980, all of them indistinguishable.

Anyway, where were we… oh right, the album. To be honest, I haven’t actually listened to it, mostly because I’m only halfway through Merzbow’s quadruple-album collaboration with Boris earlier this year. But let’s be honest, do we have to listen to it to know it’s shit? I mean, two people worked on this album and one of them is dead. Tell you what, I’ll try to give it a listen by the end of the week and I’ll let you know if it’s even slightly worthwhile. The cover art is neat I guess.

-Keith Mias

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